notifications, again :D

[Marco Martin]

On Monday 25 January 2010, Chani wrote:
> On January 25, 2010 04:20:56 Marco Martin wrote:
> > howdy all,
> > so, based on both ersonal experience and feedbacks i'm of course stilkl
> > not happy on how notifications work, that's the pretty hard question of
> > being informative enough, vs not entirely cover the screen.
> > last thing i was thinking about was something that resembles rssnow:
> > http://imagebin.ca/view/fiFONCc.html
> > this would resemble the pattern of the appletbrowser, search and launch
> > and possibly other stuff in the future.
> > 
> > -only one notification is shown at a time
> > -still valid notifications scrolls automatically or after arrows press,
> > like rssnow
> > bottom arrow would switch from valid to recent expired notifications
> 
> ebbeh... three arrows?
> my first impression is "eek! different! scrolling! scary!" ;)
> I kinda feel like this is just hiding the problems instead of really
> solving them.

yes, 3 arrows is defnitely too much

> so.. stepping back for a minute, here's what actually causes me trouble
> with the current notifications:
> 
> -they cover a rather useful chunk of my screen.
> I guess I could solve that myself by putting my systray in a less
> convenient place.

is that chunk way more mportant than the others? i guess so since tends to be 
where kmail message bodies are...
they could popup in a different are of the screen when they are automatic and 
still pop up there when explicitly open... fear would be even more confusing 
tough

> -they cover too much of my screen.
> I think there's a lot that could be done to save space before showing only
> one at a time. those two extenders for completed vs. incomplete take a big
> chunk all by themselves, even when they have nothing under them.

yes. some of those should be removed, maybe i have half an idea how to do that 
will explain later... 
but i think i'm still thinking about scrolling...

> -they're not easy to dismiss.
> I did try to hit the little X last time, but the stack of notifications
> went away just as I was clicking the mouse and I hit something in kmail
> instead. I really really miss the "click anywhere (other than a button) to
> dismiss" behaviour.

probably would be easy to do... is what we want? maybe one wants to click a 
button misses it, the notification goes away and thinks having actually 
managed to press that button

> 
> -they cover it for too long.
> something that especially bugs me is that when the latest notification
> itself goes away, the rest of the stack (even if it's just those two
> category headers) hangs around for an extra few seconds, and because of
> that my panel is also staying visible for those extra few seconds. I just
> want the darn thing to go *away*.

yes, they should have a max, right now a notification can ask to be immortal, 
kopete ones are iirc (that's in the ugly spec)

> -a lot of notifications shouldn't be there to begin with.
> I really don't care that ksnapshot is downloading my last screenshot over
> sftp when I run it. I don't need that completed "download" hanging around
> for minutes adding to the size of my notification area. perhaps this is
> ksnapshot's fault, but still, improvements could be made in what not to
> show. or at least what not to keep around once it's done. the same sort of
> thing happens if I open a link in gwenview or okular or something. on the
> one hand it's nice to know that something is happening; on the other hand
> if it's just a little 20k image it'll be done in under a second and then
> I'll have that completed "download" clogging up the notification area for
> much longer.

yes, many are useless but not much we can do about it.
for jobs the problem is totally different, in that case we exclude ones that 
last less than 2 seconds, but even this way useless one go in.

i aso think completed ones should become the same widget of notification, so 
living in the same extender with the same lifespan and go in the same old 
notifications pool.

> 
> so... showing only one at a time would solve the "covers too much of my
> screen" problem, which in turn would make me not care so much about the
> rest of the problems... it might introduce other potential issues too
> though. like the (probably small) chance of a low-battery warning being
> missed because something starts downloading a file half a second later.

job progress would still be in a different zone...
or shouldn't they? hmmm
i think jobs should remain the more visible as possible, we have already bug 
reports about people thingking jobs are done because the popup auto hidden...

> hmm. it could make sense to show only the most recent in the popup (and
> have a minimum display time of a couple of seconds perhaps?).
> I don't like the idea of clicking arrows to show them one by one, though. I
> feel half-blind when I can only see the current item in a list and don't
> know how many items there are or where I am.
> 
> I'd suggest rethinking how all the other notifications are shown.
> show the one most recent, yes, but perhaps have a button to expand and show
> all the recent/in-progress notifications. and another small button
> somewhere to show a log of old/completed notiiciations, in a separate
> window. more like a log viewer - yes, we haven't actually implemented
> logging of the notifications yet, but it'd be a place to put them when we
> do. and some things, like those ksnapshot and gwenview downloads, maybe
> they shouldn't be logged... but if they immediately went to that log
> viewer when they're done instead of hanging around on screen then I
> wouldn't care so much.

I'm not sure about an external window that would act as a log browser, also 
because logging notifications indefinitely wouldn't be that useful, just 
produce megs  of an useless file..
the idea of expired notifications was about notifications you missed say 3 
minutes before that could still be useful, knoing that 3 months ago the 
battery was critical not really...

what i'm toying with at the moment is:
* display notifications mostly as they are now until there are 2 or 3
* if there are more than that, standard vertical scrollbar, maybe not 
uberpretty but should be obvious enough those days
*keep expired notifications, but will always be necessary to scroll to view 
them, so no annoying, even the tabbar would still be visible but scrolled away
*recently completed jobs are drown in the normal notifications, so an 
extendergroup less
*running jobs still a different thing

i have now a patch that does it very -badly- (can publish it just to make 
people test but the code kills kittens) but  work-ish
if seems a good approach i can start to implement it properly

Cheers,
Marco Martin