Re: requesting official list of modules and versions for GNOME 2.14
- From: Davyd Madeley <davyd madeley id au>
- To: Paul Drain <pd cipherfunk org>
- Cc: desktop-devel-list gnome org
- Subject: Re: requesting official list of modules and versions for GNOME 2.14
- Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2006 10:20:54 +0800
On Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 12:37:36PM +1100, Paul Drain wrote:
> > > This is exactly what I mean by notification spam. I hope to get some
> > > clarification on what is good notification and bad notification that
> > > is suitable for the HIG shortly.
> >
> > In my opinion this is possibly the most clear cut and legitimate case
> > for using notifications. I think a message that essentially says that
> > your computer will run out of gas in 2 minutes is hardly "notification
> > spam".
> After all that, g-p-m came up and told me my UPS had < 5 minutes left.
>
> I think that means there are other places we can look for "notification
> spam" without crippling g-p-m's functionality.
I certainly did not mean to imply that g-p-m was the only, or by far
the worse offender, only that 4 notifications were perhaps a bit
excessive.
Here is a (somewhat long) list of example notifications and some
notes on them. Some are good, some are bad: it is my hope that these
can be reduced down to use cases for the style guidelines.
Using the power management metaphor (but not referring to anything
that g-p-m does) we can look at some events and attempt to discuss
whether or not they warrent some form of notification:
- UPS battery backup has kicked in: yes, this is not always
obvious, some notification of the event is warrented
- Laptop has been unplugged: this one is a little more vague, I
probably carried out this action myself, but perhaps for some
reason I lost power. In addition many laptops give some sort of
audible notification and hardware lights change status, but you
may have your sound down: what is the correct behaviour here?
- You're about to run out of battery power: I made this the most
obnoxious dialog in the desktop, it's large and gets in your way
(but doesn't steal the focus). I don't think it should be a
notification, because if you only have 5 minutes of power
remaining, we want to make sure you know. The dialog
automatically dismisses itself if you plug into mains. This
dialog exhibits (though accidently) very similar behaviour to
MacOSX.
- You have used up half of your battery: who cares, you are going
to look at your battery status on the panel long before the 1.5
hours it takes for this dialog to arrive.
- You have 30/20/10 minutes left: I feel that your average laptop
user (including me) will not be planning their laptop usage far
enough ahead of time for it to matter. They're not likely to say
"oh, I've only got 30 minutes of power left, I'd better start
working on this other task". If they're in an environment where
their power is limited, they will have started working on that
task first. It is my (uncorroborated) opinion that the only thing
that matters is losing your work because you run out of power.
- Beginning suspend: this seems redundant. Perhaps if I've run out
of power, the screen should be locked for input with the message
"Your battery is critically low, the machine will now suspend to
save you from losing your work. Please plug your machine in and
power back up to continue". This should be one of those
obnoxious dialogs, ideally it should appear as part of a nice
graphic that takes place while a progress bar shows you that
you're suspending. A notification that quickly vanishes is
probably not much use, and is certainly not accessible.
- "Your laptop is now fully recharged"; this is acceptable, if the
user opts to care. Having a notification bubble for this is the
current default in battstat.
- "Your mouse is about to go flat"; this also makes sense, since
now I know why my mouse stopped working.
On the subject of other applications and other uses for the
notification framework, there are a lot of things in which the
notification framework would be useful in opt-in circumstances, eg:
- new users coming online in presence framework;
- the song that is playing
- wall messages and other UNIX messages (eg, those sent with `write`):
davyd localhost says "dude, you're using all the CPU time up :("
Traditionally these are already opt-in/out, we should use that
existing framework. Also useful:
From oper charlie15: charlie15 rebooting in 5 minutes for "new
disks". This is quite common in some multiuser environments.
Here are some areas that need definite attention in any future style
guidelines:
- "You have unused icons on your desktop"... gee, thanks
- "Your system is insecure"... possibly unhelpful, perhaps it would
have been more helpful to tell me this when I somehow made it
insecure. Assuming I opted to do this (which is the way it should
be) perhaps I really want this message to f*ck off.
- "You have new updates"... not sure about this, Ubuntu started
doing it, it appears at the start of every session, even when I'm
not on an Internet connection. I have to click on this dialog to
make it go away (in Breezy at least), this was apparently
impossible to do without a mouse (because I didn't have one with
me). As a result, some part of my screen was obscured for the
whole session.
- "Your system needs rebooting"... this seems reasonable, without
giving me some obnoxious dialog, it is pointing out an icon in
the panel that will reboot my machine when I'm ready.
This email has probably gone on long enough, I have more examples
written down, these are ones off the top of my head.
--d
--
Davyd Madeley
http://www.davyd.id.au/
08B0 341A 0B9B 08BB 2118 C060 2EDD BB4F 5191 6CDA
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