[haiku-development] Re: Notification Server?
- From: "Niels Reedijk" <niels.reedijk@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 14:54:55 +0200
Hi Stephan (and others),
This is not a reply to convince you of anything, since this is a
conversation of developers rather than user interface designers, but
rather I want to reiterate my points for the record.
2007/5/24, Stephan Assmus <superstippi@xxxxxx>:
Niels, it will be done anyways (I mean, if not by us then by someone else,
in fact it has been), as much as I agree with your general notion. But I'd
rather have it under our control, so that we can make it as sane as
possible.
Yes, well, since I'm working on the Haiku Book I'm sure that I can
force some of my views on the future developers ;-).
Some useful situations for the feature were pointed out. The
thing is you are fighting windmills.
Well, since I'm from Holland I've got some experience with fighting
those ;-). Seriously though, for every useful situation I've seen, I
can think of at least one alternative (challenge me!). The example of
meetings that require notifications, could if the user requests it,
for my part be replaced with a sound notification (the interval to be
determined by the user), and with the deskbar showing an icon that
represents the event planner. Come to think of it, the better solution
would be to accentuate the time view in the deskbar (since that's what
you are alerting people for), which does a popup if you do a mouse
over. There is no need for the actual message 'meeting with Niels in
10 minutes', because you are very likely already aware of your
schedule that day, it's merely the time reminder rather than the
complete meeting reminder you want. And that could be symbolised best
by using the time. Furthermore, if you provide a system that gives the
time indicator with a gradual view of approaching events (color,
perhaps even a hint of animation), you are encouraging your user to
search for the information itself, rather than to be bluntly
interrupted. I check my time unconsciously and consciously a lot of
times, so those indicators would continually remind me of what's to
come.
By not providing the feature, you will
likely not get the reaction "ah what a relieve, Haiku doesn't have these
bothersome notifications".
No, in the best case scenario you won't get a reaction from anyone at
all, since you came up with sollutions that work intuitively for
everyone, rather than than solutions that irritates or disturbs a part
of the population.
I mean you will likely not educate the users,
they (some, many?) will simply miss a feature.
The feature you want to implement is the transmition of information.
We need to think of (individual and group) solutions for that. You are
implying the feature is the popup. This is not the feature, this is
one of the solutions, and I think it's not the best one we can come up
with.
*Everyone* here agreed that
it can be annoying. But the level at which it is annoying is different for
everyone. So the obvious solution is to provide the user a way to define
the level (which btw I have searched for in Window, but frustratingly have
not found). We can still make a point by choosing the default setting to be
"critical" or something. I hope you can see this as a compromise.
Well, it's not truely a compromise. I think I will see it as a
challenge. For each use of the popup that will surface, I will try to
implement a countersolution that does not use the framework, with the
ultimate goal to have it removed because of uselessness for R1 ;-) -
Sorry Ryan :-)
Anyway, I _hope_ people will think about the presented arguments one
more time. Let's try to do this the proper way. Identify the
problem(s), and come up with the solutions, rather than craft a
solution that is likely to draw more uses than originally intended.
Greetings,
Niels
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