Re: [Banshee-List] Minor Alpha Comments

["Andrew Conkling" <andrew conkling gmail com>]

On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 10:44 AM, Allan Day <allanday fastmail fm> wrote:

> I've appreciated it. It tells me how quickly I need to respond to get

> it out of my way or if I need to ignore it because I can't get to it
> quickly enough. That has been an annoyance in other pop-up
> notifications. I can see how it might be confusing, but with as fast
> as it moves and being that it comes up at the beginning of the song,
> the confusion can't last very long. The context would rule out it
> going to the next song at the end of the animation's cycle.

Once you understand what it's there for, it is useful. The problem is, I
think, that there isn't anything there to signify what the countdown
timer means. You could figure it out after you've seen it in operation a
couple of times (though I have to admit, it took me longer than that :)
), but the question is - should that be necessary? Shouldn't what it
does/means be immediately obvious?

What is needed is some way of clearly saying - 'this notification will
disappear after this timer has counted down'. Could you have an image of
a pop-up (or a speech bubble?) superimposed over the timer, or something?

I think it's important to avoid the assumption that people will actively
try and understand something that isn't immediately obvious. I suspect
that many users of Banshee will not work in that way.

For what it's worth, this isn't a Banshee-specific notification. It's something that, I think, libnotify supports, but doesn't seem to be used everywhere. I do know that gnome-power-manager gives me the same dialog when I plug in or unplug.