Re: Instant Message notifications

[Jesse Hutton <jesse hutton gmail com>]

On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 12:56 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam redhat com> wrote:

On Wed, 2011-05-04 at 07:40 +0200, Koppányi Tamás wrote:
> i am also really hoping that developers wouldfix this. also it would
> be great if there was better integration for empathy. right now the
> notification bar icon of empathy is barely cliackable (only the icon,
> not the text), and while the chat windows stay on the notification
> bar, but they have no sign that there might be new messages. last time
> i complained about this i got a reply that after being away from the
> computer for some time, the notification bar comes up to show you if
> there was something happening. while this is good, but since empathy
> windows look all the same if there was something happening or if not,
> i have to look through each icon manually (click them one by one,
> since mouseover also doesn't show anything). now this is even a bigger
> distraction, since because i'm affraid i'll miss some essages, i keep
> checking the messaging windows constantly, instead of focusing on my
> work.

Right - we've been through this before, but this is a good way of
looking at it. Like the others, I find that the current notification
system does not work well for synchronous chat systems (IRC in my case)
that are really important: obviously a lot of Fedora work goes through
IRC so when someone pings me on IRC it really matters, but it's easy to
miss a transient notification. I've developed a workflow workaround -
every few minutes I either manually open the notification tray and look
for the xchat bubble, or alt-tab to the xchat window - but as Koppanyi
neatly points out, our having to do this is completely destroying the
concept behind the transient notifications, and we're actually _more_
distracted than we were before.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net

I agree that non-transient notifications have some very important use cases that Gnome Shell should accommodate for. I don't know the details of the current notification system, but one approach is to have different notification levels, allowing for applications to have configurable policies and for Gnome Shell to implement a UI solution that handles each in a consistent way. Gnome Shell should be as distraction free as possible (and desirable for a given user), but no more.

Jesse