[kopete-devel] Re: kdenetwork/kopete

[Jason Keirstead]

On May 14, 2004 10:38 am, Olivier Goffart wrote:
> Eh, passive popups notifing messages are attached to the chatwindow !
> that allow to blink the taskbar entry.
>
> He already said a lot in the past on this list about this.
> But i think that a global  "show passives popup  in the right bottom
> corner" option for *all* notifications in kde could be the solution
> insteads of hacking this in kopete.

No no you misunderstand. I *do not want* popups located by the system tray. 

I don't know why everyone always assumes everyone wants poups located next to 
the tray icon or the taskbar. There are *many* reasons this is a horrible 
assumption:

- The system tray is optional, some people don't even have one. So is the 
taskbar.

- Some people put the system tray/taskbar in the top right corner, in this 
case popups there interfere not only with impotant window management 
functions but sometimes the menubar as well

- Lots of people nowadays have multiple monitors, 2 or even 3. If my KMenu and 
system tray are on the far right monitor and I am working on the far left 
monitor, what good are popups way over there? I can't even see them at all. 
Even with only two monitors, if you're working on the other one the main one 
is so out of your field of vision you often don't notice a popup until it is 
too late and you can't see what it said.

There should indeed be an option in KControl for this, but there should be 
clear policy regarding these things too, as KNotify event sin other apps like 
KMail don't follow the same guideliens for the WinId either.

IMO policy should be the following:

- All KDE systray apps should provide the winId of they're system tray icon to 
KNofity when the tray icon is active. When it is not, the main application 
winId should be used.

- There should be a KControl entry for passive popup placement with 4 options:

1) Place the popup next to the application window or system tray

	This option uses the provided winId, for systray apps this means the tray. If 
apps do not provide a winId and this option is selected, then fall back to 
option 2. This is exactly how KDE currently behaves ( read: no change )

2) Place the popup next to the taskbar entry

	This is what KDE now does if you provide 0 as the winId.

3) Place the popup next to the active window

	This option uses NET to get the active window and places the popup there. 
This is what KDE *used* to do if you provided 0 as the winId, and IMO it was 
way better.

4) Place the popup at this position

	This option would provide a buch of buttons for selecting a fixed location 
for the popup, in the exact same way as how you select the kicker location 
( see Kicker -> Layout -> "Position" ). It would also let you select which 
Xinerama display it used, if you had Xinerama enabled.

IMO This is an important multiple-desktop accessability issue that has been 
neglected for far too long.

Forwarding to kde-core-devel for comments.

-- 
Jason Keirstead 
http://www.keirstead.org