Display brightness OSD notification

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Marco Martin at 11/04/10 09:57 did gyre and gimble:
> i wonder how ubuntu is doing it, perhaps there is an usable dbus intercace?

There is it's called the desktop notification specification. And it
already works in KDE (AFAIK knotify implements this specification now
and if knotify is not running but some other compliant implementation
is, then it is used in favour of the native one). I've certainly seen
KDE applications display their notifications via the notification daemon.

So I think this part is basically working.

That said there are may things *wrong* with the approach Ubuntu has
taken with this spec (taking an existing, working specification and then
basically decided not to implement one of the parts that would give true
cross desktop GUI standardisation.

I was very annoyed about this approach and still dislike greatly the
fact they do not implement action callbacks:
http://colin.guthr.ie/2009/02/desktop-notifications-and-user-interaction/

That said, this is just their implementation, and AFAIK the KDE
implementation does implement action callbacks. Personally, if I have an
app that wants to increase the user experience via the use of "passive"
popups with some degree of interactive feedback (e.g. a button on the
popup) then I'd just refuse to work with an implementation that doesn't
support it and let the user suffer. The Ubuntu guidelines suggest that
every app should implement a fallback and present their own GUI in this
case, but for me this is just going to create a myriad of differently
presented GUIs that completely lack standardisation - especially across
a KDE/Gnome desktop.

So my plea is here: don't listen to Ubuntu on this one - use and
encourage the use of the action callbacks where appropriate. They are
useful and they provide a nice standard way of operating :)

Col

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Colin Guthrie
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http://colin.guthr.ie/

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