Re: libnotify

[Christian Hammond <chipx86 gmail com>]

Hi Murray.

In short, not a whole lot, but Mike Hearn and I have been forming a
strategy for it.

I started changing the code base to make libnotify and
notification-daemon compatibile with D-BUS 0.3x last night. It's not
in SVN yet, but it'll be in there when I have something working.

After this is done, we're going to put out a release and hack on
plugins/patches for Gaim, Xmms, Rhythmbox, Evolution, and other apps.
Hopefully get a user base. After that, I plan to work on a new
notification daemon that is plugin-based to show off what all can be
done with notifications and to provide for themes (both appearance
plugins and what I call "transitional" plugins, which are responsible
for displaying the actual notification, and may fade it wobble it in).

Not everybody likes the spec, but I think that's because a lot of
people want notifications to be more than what they are. Some people
want to embed download windows in it, or drag things to and from it,
or display a web page with CSS, or embed anything X11 based in it.

I believe these type of things aren't needed, as these are passive
notifications and are designed to be little things that simply notify
you of something and then go away. Furthermore, just embedding widgets
in it adds unnecessary complexity to the spec and implementation,
limits it on other platforms, and makes theming far more difficult
than it needs to be.

As such, we are not adding this support to the spec, at least not for
now. We'll see what people end up using this for. It's been my
experience that when a new thing such as this comes out, people demand
unending flexibility and come out with all kinds of corner cases,
maybe of which (in this case) a dialog should still be used for.
However, given time, people tend to be okay with the solution given.
The File Chooser debates spring to mind.

We are not saying that we may not someday add this type of capability
to the spec and implementation, but it is not in our plans as of now.
The Guifications project on Linux and Windows has plans to support our
spec as-is, as does (last I knew) the Growl project on MacOS X, which
provides a similar notification platform. And last I checked, the
Windows Longhorn implementation of notifications are very similar to
ours, which would allow for tighter integration when porting some
Linux apps to Longhorn in the future.

There are no existing serious competitors to my knowledge, though.
There's a couple of notification daemons sitting around, but none have
been seriously adopted. At least one or two of those that I have seen
are implementations of our spec.

Christian

On 5/26/05, Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com> wrote:
> Christian, what's happened with libnotify since you proposed it for the
> GNOME 2.10 Platform?
> 
> Is it now a freedesktop project, and part of a release set, or will you
> propose it for GNOME 2.12? Is it likely to be used soon by any GNOME
> Desktop applications? Are there competing solutions or does everyone
> like this one?
> 
> --
> Murray Cumming
> murrayc murrayc com
> www.murrayc.com
> www.openismus.com
> 
> _______________________________________________
> desktop-devel-list mailing list
> desktop-devel-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
>