Re: Request for Comments: GNOME Notifier

[Maciej Katafiasz <mnews22 wp pl>]

Dnia 28-07-2004, śro o godzinie 00:32 -0400, Franco Catrin L. napisał:
> I want to receive some ideas and thoughts from you about a User
> Notification System for GNOME, or better than that, a Desktop User
> Notification System.
> 
> I understand a DUNS as a single place where all notifications are sent
> and presented in some way to the user.  For example to receive a message
> when a new mail arrives or when a friend is online.

[snip]

> I think that the notification service should be Desktop independant, and
> it should be seen as a facility provided by the Desktop Environment.  In
> this sense it should be an specification of FreeDesktop.org.

http://eventuality.freedesktop.org , IRC channel is
#eventuality GIMPNet  No, there isn't any working code in there yet, yes
we're very much interested in getting in touch with you.

> For this spec to be successful, there should be several types of
> messages, depending of the priority and interactivity required for it. 
> It's not the same to have a message about "new wireless network
> discovered" than "battery is 10% and disconnected from power source".
> 
> Depending on the type of the message, the application can do something
> different.  For example for low priority messages, there should be a
> small unobstrusive popup that hides itself after a few seconds ("network
> cable disconnected"), but other may requiere some interaction ("low disk
> space").
> 
> I have thought that some messages need to remain visibles to the user
> until he notifies the application that the messages were seen.  I don't
> like the idea of stacking popups, because it fills up the screen and the
> size mismatch of the different notifications make them look odd.  I
> think that a better idea may be to first show the notification popup,
> and after a few seconds convert it in an icon in the same notification
> area applet, using the same icon provided for the notification, or may
> be a set of icons (animation).
> 
> Take for example a "new email arrived" message.  Instead of having a
> separate application that ask the server for new emails.  The same
> application that you use to read emails and where all your configuration
> is created, should send a message to the notification system telling the
> user that he/she has a new email. 
> 
> evolution    ->
> sylpheed     ->  Notification Bus -> GNOME Notifier/Other
> thunderbird  ->
> 
> If the user is not in his desktop, it would be a bad idea to stack
> notifications on his screen. Instead of that, the GNOME notifier will
> create a new icon (using the icon provided by the application) where the
> user can see this notification when he sits in front of the computer
> again.
> 
> If a new message of this type is sent again, GNOME notifier will add
> this information to the icon created, instead of creating a new icon.
[snip some more elaborate text on this]

FWIW, I think it should be separated into 2 parts: 1) What eventuality
(will) do, that is receiving event, and sorting it out into appropriate
action, using handlers that can alter path taken depending on
circumstances 2) App(s) that will do actual display, they should be very
self-contained and do one thing each. For that, there's spec Chris
linked to for passive notification, for other notification types, there
would be respective apps/specs.

Cheers,
Maciej

-- 
"Tautologizm to coś tautologicznego"
   Maciej Katafiasz <mnews2 wp pl>
       http://mathrick.blog.pl