Re: Window Attention Extension

[Dylan McCall <dylanmccall gmail com>]

On Tue, 2010-02-09 at 08:12 -0800, Jon Nettleton wrote:
> Hey guys,
> 
> 
> Just wanted to share my newest extension with you all.  It adds
> "Demands Attention" support to the gnome-shell message-tray.  It
> should work with most recent versions of the shell.  Basically you can
> just download it
> here, http://cloud.github.com/downloads/linux4kix/gnome-shell-extensions/window_attention_extension.tar.gz , extract it into ~/.config/gnome-shell/extensions, and restart the shell.
> 
Neat! I was imagining something a lot like that :)

How about using the same convention for minimized windows? (And only
minimized windows. That way minimizing something would work again, and
it would mean moving the one object from one place to another instead of
having the window in two different views at the same time).

One thing that worries me a tiny bit is that developers may end up
confused whether to use libnotify or "requests attention" window hints.
This connects the interface to two very differently implemented chunks
of infrastructure, each providing a slightly different experience. (One
has a big screenshot of the window and no textual information, the other
has lots of textual information and a small picture).

A document defining where each is useful would be nice, if there isn't
already one. I keep thinking of a corner case where an application may
emit a notification _and_ set a window to demand attention. (And don't
get me wrong: that has no bearing on how excellent I think this change
is; this corner case is a common problem where notifications need to be
actively dismissed).


Thanks,
Dylan