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

["Waldemar Kornewald" <wkornewald@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Niels,

On 5/24/07, Niels Reedijk <niels.reedijk@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > While I generally agree with you: some people are actually asking for
> > this kind of interruptions - why educate them with a different way of
> > managing your time when they don't want to? :-)
>
> Well, people are free to work whichever way they want, but when you
> define an API or a protocol for how to show notifications, you are
> going to stimulate application to be designed in a certain way. It
> will be very easy for applications to feed information to the
> notification server, which will eventually lead to the notificatioin
> server being the way to send information (so applications might
> actually forget to send this information to people in other ways). If
> I wrote an IM client and there would be this great notification system
> already implemented, it will not stimulate me to think outside the box
> and redesign status windows to better cater my users.
I'd rather have a system-provided, non-obtrusive solution for this
than 10 apps with their own solutions which all work differently (and
annoyingly).

Nothing is stopping us from still placing notifications where they
belong. E.g., we don't have to show "HD Full" notifications*. Also,
there are other cases when you want to be interrupted. E.g., when I
have an important appointment. In any case, IMHO modal dialogs should
never be used unless there is really nothing that is more important
than solving the issue and the issue can only be solved by choosing
one of the buttons in the modal dialog (which doesn't apply to an "HD
Full" dialog).

I think that we should try to find a notification solution that
doesn't require immediate action (e.g., popups which need to be
closed, or where you have to wait for it to fade out). When the
notification isn't critical we could simply show a new icon in Deskbar
or change the color of the affected app window. Another solution for
important messages is:
Show a (transparent?) pop-up with the text, but no buttons. As soon as
the user moves the mouse or presses a key the pop-up fades out. In the
Deskbar you can still click an icon to see an event log. See more
(including a video demo) here:
http://www.humanized.com/weblog/2006/09/11/monolog_boxes_and_transparent_messages/

*BTW, by default enabling the size bars on volume icons would IMHO be
a good additional solution (with color changing to [orange]/red when
[nearly] full), maybe extended with size information (as part of the
label?).

Bye,
Waldemar Kornewald