Re: [Usability] Notification Pop-ups

[David Christian Berg <david sipsolutions net>]

On Fr, 2004-10-22 at 11:44 -0400, Brian Skahan wrote:
> It seems like it would be a good time to resurrect this thread.
> 
> http://users.avafan.com/~fredrik/activity/pictures/burn-notification.png
> 
> http://mspace.berlios.de/gunther-user/uploads/pages/MonkeyPop/python.png
> 
> I'm very glad to see progress on the notification pop-up system, been
> using monkeypop with Muine for a few weeks, its really nice.  That
> said, its just notification, a small pop-up with Artist/Title on song
> change, there's no option for interaction.
> 
> I'm really looking forward to some of the things people have mocked up
> recently for notification of presence, and see a need to interact with
> the "Notification Bubbles", but I also see how this could get way out
> of hand, with random HTML and SVG notification canvases.
> 
> 1) Anecdotally, people want pop-up notification
> 
> 2) Some people want some eye-candy
> 
> 3) A pop-up can give you information that you want to act upon
> immediately
> 
> 4) Pop-ups are really annoying
> 
> 5) Its easy to render an HTML canvas unusable
> 
> ---
> 
> 1 2 & 3 are all addressed by current projects and/or mockups
> 4 & 5 are not
> 
> It would be good to come up with a HIG recommendation in the timeframe
> before any of these notification systems are proposed for inclusion in
> the desktop.  All the implementations are in mono at the moment, so
> odds of inclusion in 2.10 are slim to none.  2.12 may be a different
> case.

I'm not sure it should be HIG. There should be an extra notification
plugin, shouldn't there? This will show the "toaster notification" of
other apps, so therefore it'll decide on what they look like. I'm a
friend of eye candy, but I think allowing html or svg isn't the way to
go... the themes should be able to adress the pop_up (it just has to
have its very own gtk widget name) but that is all you do for eye candy.
You don't need to much HIG then and still have consistancy. This applet
would also queue popups that that only one is visible at the time.(looks
nicer)

Concerning point 4:
I think that a toaster down in the corner is way less annyoing than a
popup int he center of the screen. And popups just need to draw
attention to them... so don't make it any smaller.

Concerning point 5:
Not html anyways :)