OSD above fullscreen windows

[David Edmundson]

On Thu, Aug 14, 2014 at 11:56 AM, Thomas Pfeiffer <colomar at autistici.org> wrote:
> On Monday 11 August 2014 11:51:49 Martin Gräßlin wrote:
>> > Should it be? I would also expect the OSD to always be on top of active
>> > fullscreen windows, whatever that window might be. We also have OSD for
>> > changing the keyboard layout for example, not showing it in some
>> > fullscreen
>> > app could be quite limiting.
>> >
>> > Can we reconsider that?
>>
>> honestly: no. There's a reason for the way it is and I'm quite sure we
>> discussed it. If the arguments (e.g. private chat going over presentation)
>> do not apply for OSD then we have to realize that a OSD needs a dedicated
>> window type with a dedicated layer. But changing notification type handling
>> is wrong.
>
> I now regret that we have not yet written an HIG for OSDs, but we'll fix that
> soon, and it will be quite similar to what I'm writing in this email.
>
> Notifications and OSDs serve fundamentally different purposes. Notifications
> inform users about events (triggered by an application or a system component)
> which are not directly related to their current task.
> OSDs  are used to provide feedback for user actions that change global
> parameters and therefore cannot be given in any specific application UI.
> That's why we decided not to show an OSD when the display brightness is
> changed automatically by the power management, but show one if the users
> changes brightness manually (because then they'd like to know whether the
> screen can get any brighter).
>
> Notifications must not overlay full-screen applications (I'm sure we all have
> experienced the embarrassment when someone does a presentation on a Windows
> machine and suddenly a "Hi cutie, how are you?" pops up in the lower right
> corner of the screen.).
>
Not with that text :(

Seriously though it's equally bad to miss an IM from someone telling
you that they are currently on fire and request assistant whilst you
are busy watching Spice Girls The Movie.

If an application wants to hide notifications they have a perfectly
good API for doing it.
http://api.kde.org/frameworks-api/frameworks5-apidocs/knotifications/html/classKNotificationRestrictions.html

If they aren't using that, we should fix that in application.
Not enforced by anyone else as it renders the entire API redundant.

David