[Interest] Does Qt have a cross platform + mobile "QSystemTrayIcon"?

[Mark]

On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 4:16 PM, Rutledge Shawn <Shawn.Rutledge at digia.com>wrote:

>
> On 2 Oct 2013, at 4:40 PM, Joseph Crowell wrote:
>
> > On 02/10/2013 10:33 PM, Mark wrote:
> >> On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 7:52 AM, Rutledge Shawn <
> Shawn.Rutledge at digia.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> Ensuring that it works on the mobile platforms too sounds like a good
> idea, to the extent that it's possible.  But the lifecycle issues might be
> different, e.g. usually a "background application" can be killed at any
> time, so should the icon go away when that happens?
> >>
> >> I think it should work exactly as you just described it. If one wants
> to make the icon "persistent" then that would probably have to be done by
> the developer. This class should not care about that.
>
> http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/notifiers/notifications.html
> http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3576
> http://growl.info/
> http://www.maketecheasier.com/a-guide-to-kde-notification-system/2011/11/11
> http://www.notmart.org/index.php/Software/Notifications,_let_the_redesign_
>
> http://drfav.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/the-notifications-issue-part-3-the-possible-solution/
>
> A notification seems to be a fairly different sort of thing if we try to
> think of it as a cross-platform concept; they are usually persistent, and
> often you can re-open the application that triggered it later on (even days
> later).  The left-side "tray" icon on Android exists only to tell you that
> you have a notification; the application doesn't create an icon right from
> the beginning and then display popup balloons later on, the way it does on
> the Windows tray.  That type of icon is more like the ones on the top right
> corner on Android (wifi, bluetooth, battery, clock etc.) but I don't find a
> standard way for an ordinary application to put such an icon there:
>
>
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18350016/how-to-create-a-notification-status-bar-icon-on-the-right-side
>
> > As far as mobile compatibility goes, isn't QSystemTrayIcon QtWidgets
> based? I believe current advice is to stay away from QtWidgets on mobile
> platforms.
>
> Well a system tray icon is kindof special, but there's no point in adding
> a dependency on widgets that you otherwise don't need.  I think maybe we
> need a new Qt Quick API for notifications (but we haven't promised such a
> thing AFAIK).  In that case it will of course be independent of widgets.
>  The functionality we provide should look as normal as possible on mobile
> devices and desktops.  I just developed the MessageDialog Qt Quick API, but
> there is also a "Toast" on Android which is just another kind of popup
> message thing, and a notification is also a simple popup message, but all
> of these have different features (a MessageDialog can have an icon, up to 3
> different pieces of text, and lots of buttons, but a Toast has no buttons,
> only one piece of text, and dismisses itself, while the notification is
> persistent until the user dismisses it, even after the app has exited).
>  There are also the fairly unique push notifications on iOS (the red bubble
> with a number in it, which can be "pushed" even when the application isn't
> running).  It's hard to come up with a consistent cross-platform API for
> all of those, but at least the persistent, text-with-icon, fire-and-forget
> notification seems to be available on most platforms in one way or another.
>  Perhaps notifications can be considered more pervasive than tray icons
> (for ordinary applications, not counting "special" system tools).
>
> I always thought it was a bit arbitrary anyway that every application will
> show up in the task bar… except a few of them which consider themselves so
> special that they should reside in the tray instead.  Sometimes they are
> otherwise ordinary applications which are abusing the tray, because they
> think it's convenient for the users, or for marketing reasons (start
> automatically and stay in sight all the time so the user doesn't forget to
> use it).  Maybe that's the reason why Apple and Google both want to own and
> control the applications that can create tray icons on their devices.  So
> how can we have a fully cross-platform API for that?
>
> (Disclaimer: all of the above is my opinion, and subject to discussion;
> please don't construe as any sort of promise from Digia)
> _______________________________________________
> Interest mailing list
> Interest at qt-project.org
> http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/interest
>

Hi Shawn,

All of the above actually sounds very nice to me. I'm all in for a QtQuick
component for this purpose.
Mind you, my initial question was just an informational one. :)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/interest/attachments/20131003/73819ea9/attachment.html>