Unity vs gnome-shell : the small things - status tray

Unity vs gnome-shell : the small things - status tray 

gnome-shell status tray is an interesting implementation , written in js. Consequently, easy to learn, write for, and extend. What does bother me here, is the focus steal.

When a user click on a status tray icon and moves the cursor down diagonally, focus will switch to next nearest tray icon. This is rather annoying, and more so due to the space between the menu and the icon.

A bug has been filled for this ( gtk menu grab ? ), which Iam unable to locate.

With Unity, this is not seen as the icons are smaller and consequently user has very minimal chance of switching applet when a user moves the cursor diagonally down. Seems to me a good implementation of UI ( or is this fitt's law ?)

edit: gnome-shell has made the larger, thus fixing this issue for me.

changing brightness from gnome shell

gnome-power-manager has been rewritten for GNOME 3.2, and is now merged into gnome-settings-daemon as a plugin and this manages policy. The power management is done by UPower for most parts, except backlight.This is managed at Session level by g-s-d via power plugin using XRandR or plain old sysfs depending upon driver support.


To manages screen brightness settings, one would do so via dbus, such as shown below 

$ gdbus call --session --dest org.gnome.SettingsDaemon --object-path /org/gnome/SettingsDaemon/Power --method org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Power.Screen.GetPercentage

Now the question being, why bother at all with this aspect. On a tablet, this settings needs to be digged out and non-trivial to access. With gnome-shell-extension brightness ( http://people.redhat.com/rkhadgar/personal/gnome3-tablet/brightness.tar.xz ), you can manage the brightness from your desktop. This requires g-s-d to be patched to support "Changed" signal ( https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=658493 ).


On a side note, devs at gnome-shell are very helpful and felt good talking to them, along with rhughsie.

ToDO

• display brightness symbolic icon needs different levels, and one for auto setting.
• Ambient Light Sensor support on linux seems spotty, and needs to be fixed.