Systray Notifications

[Rob Scheepmaker]

On Saturday 29 November 2008 13:55:15 Matthias Fuchs wrote:
> Hi,
>
> First I know that the systray notifications are very new.
>
> Second I have some problems with them ;) [1]:
>
> *When logging in some messages telling me that the Ktorrent logs are copied
> somewhere pop up --> annoying
>
> *When clicking an image in a folderview I get _two_ notifications with the
> note "Examining" and _one_ "Transfering" --> so three notifications
>
> *When clicking a text file in a folderview I get two notifications
> ("Examining" and "Copying"), saving the text gets me another notification
> ("Moving")
>
> I think that in this case the the examing, copying/moving notifications
> should be hidden from the user as they should not need to know what is
> happening behind the surface.

Agreed, Ideally those should be hidden. Something I could do is only let  
notifications appear after a job has been running for a couple of seconds so 
all those very short jobs won't bother you, but other then that, there isn't 
really a way to tell the difference between important and unimportant 
messages. Any kio job will get registered to kuiserver and I don't think that 
can be changed without additions to the kio api. (and of course applications 
marking jobs as 'unimportant')

> *If you configure Kopete that a window should pop up in certain situations
> they are not grouped eg I get a message from XY "Hi" --> one notification,
> then "How are you" --> another notification while the original is still
> there and so on. I know that is basically the same way it worked like in
> KDE3 and KDE 4.1 (right?), yet there the "windows" were not that large.
>
> I think that these notifications should be merged if there would be shown
> more than one of the exact same type. Like if the "Hi" notification is
> still there the "How are you" should be shown in this notification under
> "Hi" and the notification should flash once -- or whatever to show that
> there is a change. Yet the "Hi" and the "How are you" text should disappear
> the time the seperate notifications would disappear. And if there would be
> too much (like 100 lines ;) ) text the oldest text should be dropped.
> What would be too much should be imo checked by how much space is left.

Of course, grouping... I actually have this planned for 4.3. To do this nicely 
grouping support will have to be added to the extender api. But that feature 
didn't exist before so at least it is not a regression.

>
> *The desktop is in some cases (going to elaborate that later with an
> example) not useable anymore than there are more notifications than place
> for them --> this can be a big problem for lower resolutions

Well, with more notifications then space available stuff will obviously be 
suboptimal. The question is how often this situation arises. I'm using these 
notifications in the systray for some time now, and the amount of simultaneous 
messages has never been very big. Of course with telephone like systems, that 
situation could occur, and if it does, you can use that icon to hide your 
notifications so they aren't in your way. I don't think that there's much else 
we can do about this (except grouping for 4.3). If you have any suggestions, 
please tell. :)

Regards,
Rob