Use transparency together with mouse position for notification messages

[tm]

This is an idea for enhancement.
First, the new notification daemon totally rocks, many thanks for that!

After using it for a while i'm wondering, if maybe it would be possible to adjust transparency of the message, depending on how far mouse is - the closer mouse would get to the message, the less visible it would be. I think that would smooth out the current toggling behaviour (message dissappearing on mouse over).

[Mirco Müller (macslow)]

Actually we do have some idea in that direction. The bubble should fade in/out based on the mouse-pointer proximity to the bubble. That way we would also get smooth fades on-hover, without the user having to wait for the bubble to fade in order to look-through. There are two approaches one could persue:
1.) trigger the fade in/out when the mouse-pointer enters/leaves a certain threshold-area around a bubble
2.) make the transparency/look-through a function of the mouse-pointer distance
This makes for an interesting UI-expermiment.

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

Yeah, this is a very cool idea, and worth exploring. Either a quick
prototype branch in notify-osd or a bit of flash-magic.

Mark

[Eitan Isaacson (eeejay)]

I could imagine myself receiving a notification and subconsciously moving the pointer in it's direction as I read it, and having to squint as it becomes more transparent. The sounds kind of stupid, but many of my motor reflexes are not rational :)

[Mirco Müller (macslow)]

I don't think this to be hard to implement. Thus I could give it a shot after the freeze this week in a separate branch like Mark suggests.

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

Mirco Müller wrote:
> I don't think this to be hard to implement. Thus I could give it a shot
> after the freeze this week in a separate branch like Mark suggests.
>
If you're up for a challenge, the blur should be incremental, too ;-)

[James Schriver (dashua)]

Blur is working quite well with compiz/nvidia. No regressions thus far as I can tell. I've been using blur on notify-osd for some time as it does add an asthetically beautiful effect. Alpha blur > Gaussian > !(title=notify-osd). Easy fix.

Thanks for a great project. I'm growing very fond of my unobtrusive bubbles.

[Neil J. Patel (njpatel)]

I believe this is fix-released in notify-osd 0.9.17 (at the very least). Moving the mouse closer to the notification bubble will gradually fade and blur the bubble out. Please re-open if I've overlooked something.