Contributed by Staff June 2, 2006 5:50 PM

This should be brief since it's really nothing more than a gripe, but I just got done seeing just how long it would take those silly, unnecessary, notices for the icons in the System Tray to go away. Apparently it's forever. And this is where the rant really stems from.

I generally find the items in the System Tray to be useless anyway—save the volume control maybe. So since I already find little-to no value in these little tidbits, it is easy to see how aggravating it can be when the even more pointless notices stay on the screen until they are explicitly dismissed. For example, there's an icon that indicates network status. It regularly notifies me that the network connection has been re-established. Or Automatic Update signals that it has downloaded new updates that need to be installed.

There are some operations of the computer that I don't need to know about. It's nice to be able to get to any part of the system when I want, but I really don't have a burning need to know every time my system writes a file to the hard disk. And so when I have to make a special motion to acknowledge information that I don't even care to know, it get's frustrating. Can it be that I am the only one who experiences this?

As a little aside, I find it interesting that critics of Mac OS X like to pick on the Dock as one of the reasons they feel X is not worthy of their use. In specific is the way an icon will eternally bounce when a program needs (or wants) the user's attention. It's curious that this same demand for the user's attention is not criticized with this System Tray non-sense. No?