Systray jobs and notifications

[Rob Scheepmaker]

On Friday 10 April 2009 18:58:53 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Friday 10 April 2009, Rob Scheepmaker wrote:
> > Well, the problem kind of is that the systray shows multiple things:
> > running jobs and notifications, which are distinctively different. Still
>
> are they?
>
> both are communicating system or application status to the user; both might
> offer interaction options to the user ("Chat", "Stop", etc); jobs may turn
> into notifications; notifications may turn into jobs ("So-and-so wants to
> send you a file. Do you accept?" as a notification which turns into a job)
> ...
>
> to the user it's all "stuff my computer is doing and trying to tell me
> about"
>
> i think that while they are very different programatically, humanistically
> they are actually very much the same sort of thing.

Yeah, maybe, hard to say. Now I'm already influenced by having worked on the 
implementation before actually becoming a user of this. And indeed the 
implementation is quite different, so that might have caused me to see both as 
distinctively different. 
I always find these kinds of usability questions on stuff I actually developed 
on always quite difficult, since I don't look at it the same way as I do to 
stuff that is developed by other people. But considering how often users call 
'jobs' 'notifications' while talking about this topic, I suppose you're right.

Still that doesn't make it any easier to interpret say '3/4' in front of a 
spinner. If jobs and notifications are the same for users, maybe we should 
then just put one number in front of the icon. Or maybe even none at all: if 
something happens that the user might want to be notified of, the popup should 
just open anyway...

Regards,
Rob