Comment 236 for bug 332945
Revision history for this message
| Jamin W. Collins (jcollins) wrote Re: [Jaunty] Update Notifier icon would provide useful status information | #236 |
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67d34a1
(Get the code!)
I apologize in advance for the length of this post.
@Matthew,
Sorry it's taken so long for me to respond, work and life became a bit demanding.
> (1) Yes, it is more obtrusive, that's entirely deliberate, and I don't know
> what "study" you're referring to.
While "study" may be the wrong word to use, from Mat Tomaszewski's post[1] to ubuntu-devel:
"Again, I'd like to reiterate the main point: we have a good reason to
believe that persistent indicators only work for some very specific
cases (examples being network connection, volume, etc). We are now going
through long and painful process of carefully defining these cases. It
is early days, and there can be reconsiderations. So please be patient
and forgiving :)"
Where is this "good reason", can we see the same raw information that brought the developers to what seems to be an erroneous conclusion? Access to this information was already requested in Jordan Mantha's post[2]:
"Again, I'd like to reiterate that the "trust us, we have our reasons"
is not going to be very convincing to many people. I keep getting this
sort of double-speak feeling when the same team is having to keep
pushing both "we know what were doing" and "we're just starting to
figure this out so bear with us". If you really do know what you're
doing, patches welcome. If you're still not sure yet, maybe you should
consider waiting until Karmic before making such huge changes."
and Scott Kitterman's[3]:
"References please ...."
and ktp420[4] as far as I can tell:
"Can please provide studies which show and helped in your conclusion that
"system tray is heavily overused"."
> (2) Using a notification icon to advertise updates
> is a bad idea first because it's not obvious, and second because it
> makes installing the updates gratuitously difficult.
As others have pointed out, I have no idea what you're on about. Sure, the first time a user sees the update icon they may not know what it is or does. However, from that point on, it's extremely handy and useful. I still remember when I first saw it. Sure, I wondered what it was. However, once I found out what it was, I immediately fell in love with how unobtrusive and useful it was and wanted it on all my systems. How exactly does it make "installing the updates gratuitously difficult"?
> (3) Using a notification icon to advertise that a restart is required
> is a bad idea first because it's not obvious, and second because it
> makes restarting gratuitously difficult.
I would say that using a notification icon to "notify" the user that a restart is required is *precisely* the correct thing to do. It isn't an advertisement, attempting to phrase it as such strikes me as a play on words to avoid calling it a notification. The only definition for "advertise" that comes close to what is being done in this case is an obsolete definition[5]:
"4. Obsolete. to give notice, advice, or information to; inform: I advertised him of my intention."
A much more appropriate term would be to notify or inform. Which is, as I understand it, the purpose of a notification area. How, does it make restarting "gratuitously difficult".
> Philippe, if we made only changes that were welcome to everybody, we
> wouldn't have changed anything since Ubuntu 4.10.
Please point to any other change, that was in the end beneficial with as many people reporting duplicates and such a consensus against it.
> For example, applications have been asking for over 25
> years whether you want to "save changes" to documents, but that's always
> been nonsense and should be fixed eventually.
What? I would, and do, much prefer my editor to ask than to assume that a change is desired, especially if it doesn't inherently provide a means to revert the change post closure. Why? I may have opened the document to review something and accidentally made changes (wrong window focused, inadvertent keystrokes, etc). If I'm asked to save when I close and haven't intended to make changes, I opt not to save.
[1] - https:/
[2] - https:/
[3] - https:/
[4] - https:/
[5] - http://