After testing some wine apps on Ubuntu 11.04 A2 today, and using 10.10 NE in previous weeks, I've notice a few issues that may hinder the use of Wine on this OS. These are mostly aesthetic and ease of use, but are worth noting in any case. 1: Removal of Notification Area/System Tray For those who aren't aware, 11.04 and 10.10N used the new Unity interface, instead of the legacy GNOME GUI. In terms of functionality, this means that the Notification Area has been removed, and so the normal Wine Dock has been undocked. This creates a floating "Wine System Tray" window, containing the notification icons from the normal systray. As it's now a normal window, it can be hidden beneath the (potential) dozens of windows that one has open, and means it might be difficult to sort out a misbehaving Wine App. 2: Running Multiple Wine Apps in Unity - Visibility The main feature of the new interface is the left-hand sidebar, containing some pinned launchers, and all currently open applications, with all of one application's windows compiled into a single link. At a first thought this doesn't pose a problem, but on closer observation, all Wine apps are shown with a (rather attractive, don't get me wrong) Wine icon on the bar. This means it's not possible to identify (even by hovering over, which returns the label "Wine") what the Wine app open is, without scrolling through the windows. If I were running MS Word, Powerpoint and Excel at the same time, with Spotify and Firefox all under Wine, I'd have those 5 windows (or more, depending on number of instances), plus the Systray, all under the same icon on the sidebar, making it impossible to navigate to which program is needed, without scrolling through them all. Finally, even if these programs WERE separated, they'd all have the Wine icon, so the ability to tell what the programs are is STILL not there. I hope that Wine can solve these issues... and that any other issues are noted... before the release of Natty in Apr-11. -A-
