FreeLists / haiku-development / [haiku-development] Re: Notification Server?

["Niels Reedijk" <niels.reedijk@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi guys,

Even though there's been a lot of discussion already on
implementational details, I'd like to go back to the fundamental
question DarkWyrm asked.

2007/5/23, DarkWyrm <darkwyrm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> Personally, I have never seen it done well. Ever. Not on Ubuntu, not on
> Windows, and not on Zeta. In theory, they are a good idea, but in
> practice they serve to be an annoyance. There are two main problems with
> this method. The problem with popup notifications is that they interrupt
> the user and the user's work. They are also visually distracting if the
> user attempts to ignore them. Lastly, they also suffer from the same
> problems as BAlerts -- they are too easy for a lazy developer to use, so
>   it ends up being used for all sorts of stuff, like a new song being
> played in the MP3 player, an update to the weather forecast, and to ask
> you if your refrigerator's running. ;P
I'd like to go a bit further and make it a conceptual question. It's
not so much the way the popups interrupt the work, it's the fact that
it does at all.

Let's face it, we live in a work where interruptions have become
common ground. The mobile phone radically changed the way we work: we
literally must be on 'stand by' all the time, because the device can
interrupt us at any time. It costs us heaps of time. Google on the
idea that it takes time to get into a 'zone' of productivity. Every
interruption pushes the reset button and you need another twenty
minutes or so to get back.

What this notification system will do is continually interrupt us. It
will dictate how we should spend our time, instead of letting us
coordinate how we want to use it. Let's face it, User Interface design
teaches us that every form of interruption, how minor it might be,
interrupts our 'flow', because we are staring at a small area of
space, knowing that our eyesight is guided based on things that move
or change. I hear people telling us they need to keep track of
important business email. I'd advise them to do better time planning
and decide when you want to look at those e-mails. Maybe you will need
to make time for them every hour, or every thirty minutes, but don't
let the system dictate you when to use it. Management that insists on
abusing email, which has traditionally been a passive medium, should
be educated. And for truly important things, there's the possibility
of using the phone or walking by someones office.

We are talking about critical problems. What's defined as critical,
for me, is something that immediately requires user input. A problem
that the software itself can't deal with, and that needs our input.
We've got modal dialogs for that. And while I'm breaking my head over
any examples, I can hardly think of anything that critical that it
needs our input.

So instead of notifications, which _will_ be abused, we should work
the other way around. As a user we should control our time.
Controlling time means actively deciding what to do. If you want to
keep up to date with people signing in on your favourite IM network,
it should be easy to have a status window of that IM in the
foreground. The software should facilitate that, instead of the other
way around. Yes, you could create a notification service for that, but
I doubt except from these specialised cases, it will have any
legitimate uses.

So I would urge everyone to have a look at it from this point of view,
instead of discussion priorities, severities, statuses, ignoring, and
think about what you really wanted to be interrupted on. I hope you
will agree with me that we should 'pull' the tool (= the computer) for
what we want to do with our time, not let it dictate us what we want.

Niels