Re: notifications (window hints)

[Adam Williamson <awilliam redhat com>]

On Wed, 2010-12-01 at 19:43 -0500, William Jon McCann wrote:

> I think (though I may be mistaken, it has been a while) that I
> addressed this in the original GNOME Shell design document.  In brief,
> my view is that interruption without information is disruption.  A
> blinking light will be psychologically compulsory.  You are forced to

I see what you're saying. For the xchat case I actually quite *like*
this: I want to be impelled towards replying to IRC when someone pings
me. If nothing is jumping up and down to remind me I have to reply to
someone on IRC, I tend to forget about it. But I get your perspective.

> > This seems to me a subtly different case from notifications, which is
> > why GNOME 2 handled it differently: xchat can't really tell me *what*
> > it's notifying me about in a way that works with the notifications
> > system, it's really just a 'you should probably look at this window now'
> > hint. It seems to me that it'd be a benefit to implement this into GNOME
> > 3 alongside actual notifications, just as it was in GNOME 2, but fitting
> > the GNOME 3 interface.
> 
> xchat can most certainly tell you what is notifying you - just like
> many other communication programs.  It does this for me so I'm not
> sure why it doesn't for you.  Perhaps there are some poor defaults
> that for how it sends notifications.  I think the Shell might even
> have special handling for xchat.  Don't know the details offhand.

It doesn't seem to. (I actually run xchat-gnome, not plain xchat). All
that seems to happen is the very subtle 'notification' action - a tiny
icon shows up bottom right for a couple of seconds then disappears. When
you go back to the notification tray and move over the icon all it tells
you is 'xchat-gnome'. Thinking about it I guess it could provide the
actual line someone said, or something like 'user foo said your name in
channel bar', or something like that. That'd be nice, sure.

> Big picture:  Apps don't get to demand our attention.  They have to request it.

Now you've made me think about it, I think my problem is your first
point: in the case of IRC I at least really *want* the app to demand my
attention. Politely requesting it for two seconds just isn't enough; I
can easily completely miss the very polite 'notification' action if I'm
engrossed in something else (it's happened to me multiple times today
already). It's just not enough poke to get through to me unless I'm
doing absolutely nothing else at the time.

(there's a vaguely related buglet here which is that the notification
system doesn't account for dual screens at all; to get the notification
area to show up on a dual head system you have to either go to the
overview, or very carefully position your cursor exactly at the bottom
right hand corner of the left hand screen. You can't just shove the
corner to the bottom right, as I assume is the intention. But really, a
design which relies on me manually checking every ten minutes to make
sure I didn't miss xchat politely requesting my attention has already
lost, for my specific habits.)
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net