volume notification looks bad when an indicator is open

[Leo Arias]

I found this while testing silo 11 with krilling #88.

Steps to reproduce:
Open an indicator.
Press a volume button.

(see the attached screenshot)

You will see that the notification appears, but it's the same color as the header. It has no borders, so you can't tell it's a popup. It looks like the header changed to something that's no properly aligned.

phablet@ubuntu-phablet:~$ apt-cache policy indicator-sound
indicator-sound:
  Instalados: 12.10.2+14.10.20141007-0ubuntu1
  Candidato: 12.10.2+14.10.20141007-0ubuntu1
  Tabla de versión:
 *** 12.10.2+14.10.20141007-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://ppa.launchpad.net/ci-train-ppa-service/landing-011/ubuntu-rtm/ 14.09/main armhf Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

--------UX comment---------

When feedback bubbles ('volume notification') appear on top of a dark background (e.g.: notification centre, other indicator menus) we should use a light theme. Link to the spec: https://docs.google.com/a/canonical.com/document/d/1xDSZ_dnAMAlhgFnnyjJEibaITXjVLp1_pnj_tATNm9I/edit#heading=h.j3eco8r9od3s

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Volume notification bubbles should never appear when the sound indicator is open (or when the "Sound" screen of System Settings is active). But this problem would still exist in the other indicators. I see only three possible solutions: change the visual design of the indicators, or change the visual design of the notification bubbles, or both.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Mirco has pointed out to me that the notification system normally uses a light background color when the surroundings are dark. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi-Z2Rn7Fxo>

So the problem here is that the code to detect dark surroundings didn't work.

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

No, the problem is that there is no "code to detect dark surroundings", it's only snap decisions that have a light background, no other notifications do.

[Mirco Müller (macslow)]

You are all not fully correct.

Current notifications in unity8 trunk have snap-decisions using "dark on bright". All other notification-types use "bright on dark". These color-schemes are static currently.

The unity8 branch (lp:~macslow/unity8/synchronous-notification) up for review - introducing the synchronous notification type - also introduces dynamically adapting color-schemes for all non-snap-decision notification types. Thus ephemeral, interactive and synchronous notification-types are able to dynamically switch from "bright on dark" (default) to "dark on bright" based on two cases...

1.) They show up if one or more snap-decision notification is currently shown

2.) They show up if an indicator is visible.

Please also see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwEYLXNaL0Q (esp. at 0:23).

It is true that the notification-system can't monitor the average background color of what is behind it. Gaining that capability is very unlikely - now and in the future - but this new branch is trying to solve conceptual UX-flaws for RTM as much as possible. This is certainly better than what we have currently in unity8 trunk. It will avoid getting several user-complains of "dark on dark" situations. So this bug is implicitly fixed in lp:~macslow/unity8/synchronous-notification already.

[Selene ToyKeeper (toykeeper)]

RTM krillin image 109... the volume notification hides the volume indicator's controls while actively changing the volume.

[Mirco Müller (macslow)]

Selene, you a right about the issue with the volume-notification. Matthew mentioned this too in comment #3. But I suggest opening a new bug for the "sync. volume notification over sound-indicator" as the initial background-color contrast of this bug is fixed.

Let's not have bug-entries organically morph and become moving targets.

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

This has been circulated enough, let's just use this bug then, I added the relevant tasks for i-sound and settings app so that they tell the backend when not to trigger the bubble.