Program-Manager-II

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Program Manager currently lacks any way to view or interact with the system's Notification Area. Popular shells like Cairo include the ability to view it. A tough to implement feature but necessary for ease of use and any chance at becoming a viable shell replacement. Help deciding on how/where it should be implemented is appreciated, not sure whether it should act as a docking window (a la the color palette in Paint.NET) or dock to the edges of the screen (like the Language Bar).

I think you should take a cue from LiteStep (http://litestep.net/) which has a modular design. There are also individual modules, like for example a program called "TrayModule" (I can't find the link anymore) which supports only the system tray. It is possible that there is a program like this for notifications.

Afterwards, it seems to me that notifications are a big mess in recent Windows, because of the stupid win32/UWP/Other mix.

Personally, if you want to add functionality like this, I think it's better to add them in separate processes, in a modular way, because:

• It decreases the risk of crashing
• This allows the user to choose the features they want
• It facilitates the development

Overall, I think the challenge (both for progman and a shell like this : http://www.foxplanet.de/explorer/index.html, or even for cairo or bblean) and being able to implement a communication process with the mess of "modern" Windows elements (UWP , WInUI, Metro...) without contaminating clean C/C++/Win32 code (A little less for cairo, because C#).

Was looking at LiteStep and the blackbox shells before for examples. I really love the modularity they have and have been thinking of creating a task-bar like thing for Progman that would accept plugins with an interface similar to a toolbar that just happens to be on the desktop. It would take a lot of planning to pull something like this off as well as making it possible to disable for users who want a classic experience.

There's a lot to add to Program Manager that many people (myself included) would view as necessary or at the very least extremely useful that's present in Explorer and other shells but doesn't exist under this shell.