notifications, again :D

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On January 25, 2010, Marco Martin wrote:
> -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

i like the idea of one notification at a time as well as being able to scroll 
through them.

there are some other design parameters here, too:

* what is shown automatically (popped up) as opposed to when the user clicks 
on the icon

* how are jobs displayed

* how are notifications from multiple apps shown

when a notification first appears, right now it pops up along with everything 
else that is also there. that's not particularly great for two reasons:

a) i've probably already seen the other information already, so it becomes an 
unintentional "nagging"

b) it makes it harder to pick out what the new content is amongst all that old 
content

so i think it would make sense to have a "what pops up" UI, and one-at-a-time, 
scrolling one after the other if there are lots of them makes sense to me. 

if there are lots of them, clicking the close button or the (i) icon should 
dismiss the popup UI until new ones appear.

when clicking the (i) icon, i'd like to be able to see the last active 
notification of each application. e.g. if kopete and kontact have both sent 
out a notification to me, i should be able to see both if i purposefully click 
the (i). however, if kopete has sent 10 notifications, i should probably only 
see the most recent one, and be able to scroll through the older ones.

so perhaps there is a "notification scroller" widget? it can be used to 
display all new notifications as they appear in the same scroller (regardless 
of whether they come from different applications). it can also be used to show 
all the notifications of any one application when the (i) is clicked.

an "expand" button in the auto-popup widget could expand to show the "full" 
interface, which would therefore be synonymous with clicking the (i) when the 
notifications UI closed.

but what about jobs? perhaps a similar mechanism but with some tweaks. the 
summary view could be *in* the jobs tracker area instead of a separate item. 
the jobs tracker could expand/contract to show all the jobs and the user could 
page between them using the same scroller window? or perhaps it could expand 
to show each active job as a one-liner:

	filename [--- progress bar       ]

and each of those could also be expanded to show the full informational widget 
we have now.

by default it would show each download as a one-liner, and this could be 
"minimized" down to show just the summary.

the remaining use case there would be someone who wants to see all jobs fully 
expanded by default.

in any case, this would mean that the jobs area would only ever take one 
"section" of the notifications UI, and each application would get at most one 
section of its own as well.

when a job starts or a new notification appears, the "new things" scroller 
appears and shows JUST the new items and autohides after a while unless the 
user expands it to show the "full" display.

in fact, if we wanted, we could make the full display "collapasable" so that 
it only shows the "new things" UI. in the code, i think these would probably 
end up as two different widgets totally, but to the user it could appear that 
it's the same widget (because it appears in the same location with similar 
information in it) just expanding/shrinking in detail and size.

this would make it a drill-down type interface which shows more information at 
once when the user requests it.

as for positioning ... maybe now that we can turn everything else on/off in 
the system tray it's time to add a feature so that it is also able to be 
disabled in a given tray.

in fact, maybe it's time it became it's own plasmoid altogether which is by 
default hosted in the system tray.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks