Fixing Notifications Plasmoid

[Marco Martin]

> = 1 =
> http://box.jisko.net/i/2926ce.png
> Three notifications. They all fit in the box. But there's a scroll bar. Why?

empty widget for jobs that somehow gets into the extender, shold be easily 
fixable

> = 2 =
> http://box.jisko.net/i/c2694a.png
> Then, some Kopete notifications appeared. I clicked the notifications icon. 
Why does that
> 'Multimedia System' tab appear, if there are no notifications for it?

i noted it happening as well, pretty rare tough.
seems that when a notification auto expires (as opposed to being closed by the 
user) not everyting gets cleaned out

> = 3 =
> http://box.jisko.net/i/d71f94.png
> A Kopete notification appeared while I was in that Multimedia box. The box 
changed its size (?!),
> confusing the user, and then a 'Kopete Messenger' notification header 
appeared. Yes, in the
> Multimedia tab. At least, it is no longer empty...

probably filtering is not applied to new appearing ones, looks like an one 
liner as well

> = 4 =
> http://box.jisko.net/i/b5c809.png
> I clicked the Kopete tab. Now, the notification headers are all mixed up 
with the real notifications.

he manually collapsed them. can't find another explanation. a thing like that,  
in a spontaneous way, never happened to me. never.

> = 5 =
> http://box.jisko.net/i/f4356b.png
>I started playing with the mouse wheel. You know that 'kinetic' behaviour 
when you move the wheel up
>or down? Seems that I changed the tab while I was moving the entire UI down, 
so it got stuck there.

for how event propagation in Qt works, the scroll widget has to intercept 
events -before- they're delivered to the childs.
that results in both widgets managing it.
now probably the mouse wheel *could* not get filtered and would work "good 
enough"  since not many widgets accept the wheel. I'll give a try.

> = 6 =
> http://box.jisko.net/i/8e65b1.png
> I opened it again. Now I got this. The notifications and their ghosts. See: 
now the notifications box
> is not attached to the right side of the screen, the 'Chat' button has 
different sizes for the two users
> (priorities? undocumented feature? :) ) and there's some unused space at the 
bottom.

-different button size: as aaron said, different text layout, so not really 
avoidable.
-gost thing: no, that doesn't happen, not even photographic evidence can 
convince me, he collapsed those manually ;)
-empty space: as mentioned: is the invisible job extendergroup that shouldn't 
be there

> = 7 =
> http://box.jisko.net/i/5fe972.png
> I closed some 'ghosts'. The 'Chat' button size is still not ok, but 
everything looks fine. Well, not
> everything. The scroll bar is too tall, it's on the 'Notifications' header, 
which should be static. And
> now the notifications box is attached again to the right side.

all of that is the intended behaviour, like it or not

> = 8 =
> http://box.jisko.net/i/5a898b.png
> I closed some more notifications. Now the box is not attached to the right 
side (!!!), and there's some
> unused space at the bottom. Again.

the attached behaviour should be more consistent in trunk.
the empty space, reporting it 10 times doesn't make it more likely to get 
fixed :p

> = 9 =
> http://box.jisko.net/i/71cb3d.png
> I closed the ghosts, and now this is what I get: a completely wrong place 
for the scroll bar. Oh, and
> unused space.
scrollbar positioning fixed in trunk, modulo usual qgraphicslayout bugs :p

> = 10 =
> http://box.jisko.net/i/1ada2f.png
> The same as the previous screenshot.

fixed as well.

now, I have to say an unconfortable thing I'm thinking since a while about 
notifications that has however to be said:

<rant>
Overall, this message is really annoying and written with an attitude that 
really makes me *not* wanting to work on it anymore or fix thse issues, even 
if the issues per se are almost all valid. (actually, at this point i find 
notifications a quite utterly uninteresting thing to work on)

Since the "automatic" ones aren't much annoying anymore, they even take 
significantly less space than the kde3 or ubuntu ones.. I don't really 
understand the obsession everybody has about notifications, wait, actually 
it's not true, I do. 

Notifications are the typical user facing thing that makes everybody thinking 
they're usability experts, voicing loud opinions (where in reality in 
usability studies there is exactly zero space for opinions)

So, I'm all for fixing obvious bugs and annoyaces (such as most of these 
ones), but I'll be decisely against any serious behavioural/design change at 
this point, like the periodic systemsettings random icons reshuffle that can 
only make thigs worse.
This at least until I see some real validated usability study about the 
current behaviour (iirc Celeste is doing one for her phd).
This means i don't want to hear at all neither personal opinions nor the "i 
made it use to my uncle" type of "studies".

I would be instead quite interested to a statistically relevant sample be 
confronted to presence vs assence of things like the actions, the history, 
click trough or not.
</rant>

Ok, now I said it, I feel better :p 

Cheers,
Marco Martin