Re: Notification Widget

[Dylan McCall <dylanmccall gmail com>]

> > Libnotify is for system-wide notification messages, not individual
> > application UIs.
> 
> That's unfortunately what some users of it want to believe. Except
> reality disagrees with you. The API was designed for this use case.

Then I think the Desktop Notifications Specification would need to be
updated.

>From http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/0.9/index.html

        1. Introduction
        
        This is a draft standard for a desktop notifications service,
        through which applications can generate passive popups
        (sometimes known as "poptarts") to notify the user in an
        asynchronous manner of events.
        
        This specification explicitly does not include other types of
        notification presentation such as modal message boxes, window
        manager decorations or window list annotations.
        
        Example use cases include:
        
              * Presence changes in IM programs: for instance, MSN
                Messenger on Windows pioneered the use of passive popups
                to indicate presence changes.
              * Scheduled alarm
              * Completed file transfer
              * New mail notification
              * Low disk space/battery warnings


Asynchronous is an important word there, in my interpretation. Also, the
fact that this is a dbus API would say something to the benefit of my
interpretation. If this was just for the purpose of creating a fancy
dialog box with an arrow, it should be a GTK widget, no?



        3. Backwards Compatibility
        Clients should try and avoid making assumptions about the
        presentation and abilities of the notification server. The
        message content is the most important thing.
        
        Clients can check with the server what capabilities are
        supported using the GetCapabilities message. See Protocol.


Key lesson to gather from there: positions, actions, etc. should not be
relied upon. Then, there's a useful rule in application design: do not
use things that can't be relied upon as a sole means of communication.

This also says quite clearly that notify-osd is not broken, it's just
different, which is entirely permissible within the spec (and encouraged
by its mere existence). Is Maemo's implementation broken? Gnome-shell's?
Fedora's patches for making it look different? Notification-daemon with
any theme that removes the pointy arrow? Why does Galago bother
maintaining two separate projects when they could just say
notification-daemon is god and tie everything straight to it?

Looking forward to hearing your interpretation; maybe I'm reading the
wrong document or something.


(Created a new subject just in case, but hopefully it isn't necessary; I
don't intend to make more noise about this since I am probably about to
wander out of my depth :b).



Dylan