Re: Notifications & Instant Messaging.

[Tassilo Horn <tassilo member fsf org>]

Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam whitemice org> writes:

> Is there any possibly technique or setting to make notifications
> useful?  For instant messaging [Empathy] the current situation is very
> ineffective - notifications appear and disappear and if I'm not
> looking at the screen at that moment.... I'm not notified.

Yes, that's also happening to me.  So now (using GNOME 3.2) I'm trying
to teach me the habit of checking for notifications I got while being
absent from the computer by hovering the mouse over the bottom-right
corner.  Well, that's no solution but a workaround.

There should be some visual indication of missed notifications that
directly jumps into one's eye.  For example, this blue circle with the
numbers of pending notifications should be visible without having to
hover over the bottom-right corner.

> At least in Empathy is there a configuration option to
> open-a-chat-window for any new incoming conversation?

Not that I know of.  Another thing that I don't fully understand is that
when I set my status to "Available" in the top-bar's right user menu, I
guess empathy is started in some headless mode, and messages arrive as
notifications where I can reply directly in the notification.

That's nice for short conversations, but not for longer discussions or
chat's that require some previous context.  In that case, I'd like to be
able to open a "real" empathy chat window, but the best (only) way to do
so I have found is to start empathy manually (from the overview), and
then double-click on the contact.  Before being able to do that, I have
to right-click > Remove the chat notification.  Else, no chat window for
that contact will be opened.

I'd much welcome if there was a way to transform a chat currently taking
place in a notification into a normal empathy chat window and vice
versa.

But all in all, the GNOME 3.2 update made the chat notifications much
more usable than in 3.0.  In 3.0, when opening an empathy chat window
after chatting via the notifications, the order of messages was totally
broken.  When the real chat was alternating she/me/she/me, what was in
the empathy chat window (and history) later on was she/she/me/me.

Bye,
Tassilo