Improved tray menu

[jancborchardt]

We need to improve the archaic style of the tray menu. It has a lot of text entries and misses focus.

When you look at Dropbox and Google Drive, both show a list of last uploaded files with a quick option to share those files.

cc @camilasan @jpnurmi

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Some early mockups on an improved tray menu:

The goal is to achieve a better information hierarchy than just with the flat menu as we have now. Obvious inspiration are the new Dropbox tray menu and CloudApp.

• The menu should show regardless whether the tray icon is clicked with the left or right mouse button.
• Sync status and account info is shown in the top bar on the left
  • On hovering the account info or status icon, a pause sync function is shown in place and sync is paused when clicked. (Hovering that will show »Resume« and resume on click.)
• The other icons are for »Open local folder«, »Open in browser« and Settings
  • The settings gear exposes the rest of the actions: Showing the quota, Settings dialog, Help, and Quit Nextcloud
• The list directly shows 4 and a half of the most recent activities, not only file syncs but also Calendar changes, Talk invitations etc (last should be half as a visual cue it can be scrolled)
  • List length could be ~15 most recent activities, after that an entry »Older activities …« which should open the Settings dialog with the Activity tab selected.
  • Ideally there are file type icon / previews if possible for quick identification. But if this is more work we can leave it out for now.
  • Errors could be shown on the top, with retry option (like in the mobile clients Transfers view)
• Hovering over an entry exposes a »share link« button next to it.
  • Clicking on »share link« creates a read-only share link on the server and copies the link to the clipboard automatically, giving feedback that this happened.
• Multiple accounts can easily be accommodated using tabs
  • The status of each account is quickly visible directly in the tab
  • The status bubbles up, so if one account is syncing, the sync icon should be shown
  • If there are more than ~3 accounts configured, we could have a »More« entry with a dropdown list
  • Instead of the full icon with the cloud, it would be better to only show the status part of the icon there
• For Windows, or when the system tray is on the bottom, the balloon arrow should just be on the bottom. The bar with account info could also be at the bottom but it’s not that important.
• Bonus (different issue): Moving a file onto the tray icon could directly put it into Nextcloud and sync it (similar to CloudApp, which actually directly shares it and copies the share link in the clipboard – that’s too specific and too much for us though)

[jpnurmi]

Nice! I have never actually tried customizing a tray icon menu like that, but it might be possible to implement it as a custom popup if Qt's menu is not flexible enough.

[tanghus]

• The menu should show regardless whether the tray icon is clicked with the left or right mouse button.

Now LMB shows the application. How would you do that otherwise. Not in the menu, please ;)

[karlitschek]

Nice. There should also be a place to show the shortcuts to the server apps. Same feature as exists at the moment already

[camilasan]

For reference: https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/25/dropbox-will-start-rolling-out-the-new-dropbox-app-to-everyone-today/

[brainchild0]

It could definitely be extremely appealing to have an elegant tray menu, but for me the single most helpful change to the tray interface would be the ability to open the main window merely by double clicking, rather than selecting Settings, which is located at bottom of the drop-down menu, and which is really status and settings combined.

I also note a change in the e0b32c1 release, compared to the ef9315c, in which the tray icon is colored, rather than being grayscale, as it had been on my system before, which I had assumed was a selection made to respect my desktop theme.

As I am sure also has been considered, an icon ideally indicates the function or branding of an application, rather than being simply a check or cross to indicate status, as they might apply equally to any function.

Returning to the actual intent of this issue, a nicer menu might be very handy, but I would only caution against a design in which a menu expands to arbitrary size because of long file names. These scenarios impair usability and in many cases evade the notice of testers.