notifications, again :D

[Riccardo Iaconelli]

On Monday 25 January 2010 13:20:56 Marco Martin wrote:
> opinions? comments?
> would like to hear some feedback before implementing anything since each 
> solution would lead to a different total screwing of the current 
> implementation :p

mmh, in my experience, most of the problems are coming from two sources, the 
first one being the visual design and the size of the notifications, the 
second one being the perceived slowness and burden of the whole system each 
time a notification has to be shown.
I actually did the visual design so I feel a bit guilty here :)

to see if my suspects were confirmed, I tried for some time to go back to old 
style notifications, and i noticed that many problems just went away.

to explain the two parts in detail:

- slugghishness: at least here, after a while that the X server is on, 
notification can take even half a second to appear, if not more. in that time 
i begin seeing some crap on the screen (there's a transparent window created 
and moved or sth like that), the system feels less responsive (e.g. if i'm 
watching a full screen video it starts loosing frames) and in the end it 
annoys me and catches my attention for much longer than what is really 
necessary for 99% of the notification. For the messages fire and forget (like 
"foo is online!") it really becomes WAY too much.

- visual design: this is somewhat related to the above point, the actual 
design is infact somewhat "important" and "baroque". i have in my mind 
something more similar (just in the ballon-ey look, don't worry :-) ) to the 
deeply loved atayana notifications that Adrien showed us. I think that his 
feeling of "this is much faster" is in large part due to that.

sorry for the brain dump a bit confusive, but I'm a wee bit tired today. :-)

I can try to draw some mockups, but I hope that this reflection helped.

Bye,
-Riccardo
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