Comment 128 for bug 332945
Revision history for this message
| Vincenzo Ciancia (vincenzo-ml) wrote Re: [Jaunty] Update Notifier icon would provide useful status information | #128 |
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67d34a1
(Get the code!)
MPT: I am very sorry to point this out, but in the e-mail that you are linking, you are not being fair to the discussion topic. In particular, you deliberately confuse persistent, non-interactive notification with unrequested new interactive windows. Getting to the conclusion that a "no unrequested popups" approach is impossible, while this approach is recognizeably that of gnome 2.0 and the following versions, and most of us really appreciate that aspect.
Referring back to a -devel only discussion is like saying you don't care of the opinion of users. Since I am sure that you care, please do put this under discussion; the reaction is too strong, and it's for sane principles.
Just waiting for the flames to settle won't be nice, and it seems to me that it's being done here.
Peter Whittaker in particular wrote a wonderful summary of the usability problem that we all see (in terms of violation of an user's own working space) and I am sure he spent a lot of time in it. Why acting like the message adds nothing new to the discussion? In fact I can't see how to object to the first part of it, even if I don't completely like the proposed solution. Therefore, I spend some more time in proposing another alternative, perhaps in line with all the changes happening in ubuntu.
A possible design concept alternative to Peter's one is to have bubble notification, and have "important ones" such as system updates iconifiy to some applet, e.g. the indicator applet, which changes in response to this, and _keeps the message_ there for the user to read it and initiate some interaction with the system. Messages should _stay there_ even after reboot, unless they get obsolete by some rule (e.g. the user upgrades the system).
Compiz animations would make it very clear where do notifications go after disappearing and an immediate cause-effect relationship would be established with the change in aspect of the indicator applet.
This is a simplified version of my "the system is talking to you, let's use a chat client for that" proposal which has been gladly ignored by the majority of us :)