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libnotify in GNOME Applets

Submitted by stro on Tue, 2005-07-05 09:20. GNOME
GNOME

Rodrigo Moya has created a patch adding support for libnotify in a few GNOME applets. You can view a few screenshots showing examples in his blog here. While Rodrigo has already scrapped the trash notification, there are many places where this could be a nice enhancement in the GNOME Desktop. What do you think? What types of actions would you use/not use notifications?

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I hope this catches on

Submitted by Anonymous George on Wed, 2005-07-06 19:18.

Despite what people seem to be saying, I love the little corner notifications in Windows. I like to know when I have an email, and I like to know when someone has messaged me in case I'm focused on something else and don't see the window pop up. I even like to have them go off when something mundane happens like muine changes songs. So far, this kind of functionality has been quite lacking on the Linux desktop. Gnotify worked for a while, but has since become nonfunctional for me. It was never well supported anyway.

I'd really like to see Gnome standardize on something like libnotify. Put it into the HIG as the preferred method for non-urgent communication. If your computer needs to say "hey, by the way you have an email/someone messaged you/here's the info for the current song/your download is finished/etc...", I'd like it to be nicely tucked away in the corner, look good while it's there, and have it gracefully exit after a few seconds. These libnotify boxes do all of the above. I very much hope this becomes widespread.

Updates, critical situations, mail, IM, RSS, ...

Submitted by eh on Tue, 2005-07-05 14:37.

One obvious use would be announcing that there are new software updates to be installed, another would be telling the user that she/he is running out of space on the HD (or battery on a laptop).

I would definately like to be notified when I receive a new email or an instant message, as well. Maybe for new items on RSS feeds I'm
following, too.

It could also be used for notifying the user about finishing something which takes a long time, ie. downloading a large file, burning or ripping a CD etc.

What I'm wondering about is the relationship between these new notification pop-ups and the much abused notification area. Is this supposed to replace it or co-exist with it? Is there anything to be done about reserving the notification area for just notifications?

This is incredibly important

Submitted by Anonymous George on Wed, 2005-07-06 08:54.

"One obvious use would be announcing that there are new software updates to be installed, another would be telling the user that she/he is running out of space on the HD (or battery on a laptop)."

Currently GNOME on Linux handles this pretty badly. Most things simply quietly fail when you are out of diskspace and some things crash.

Imagine if the following happened instead:
1. User downloads a big file with Web Browser
2. User runs out of disk space
3. Application is notified through DBus of lack of disk space before it is completely empty.
4. File download is paused, user is notified of lack of disk space.
5. User empties wastebasket
6. Browser is notified of sufficient file space by DBus.
7. File automatically resumes download and tells user by libnotify.

Gaim already do that by Anonymous George
Gaim by Anonymous George
useless and unproductive by Anonymous George

GNOME 2.12...

Submitted by Anonymous George on Tue, 2005-07-05 11:29.

Will be included in GNOME 2.12?

I can't waith.

Great job Rodrigo.

Good thinking, useless features

Submitted by Anonymous George on Tue, 2005-07-05 11:18.

As many have already stated, a notification of trash change is totally useless as it is the user who sends something to the trash. But, it is a good testbed, and it can be used for useful things. A notification when the laptop battery is low, fully charged or AC adapter is taken away are all usable things, and I personally would like it if I got a notification when a big file I've been downloading for a while is finished. This could be used for bittorrent also, if the bt client supported that. Anyway, I hope this idea doesn't get discarded, just thought more carefully through.
-WereCat

screen occupation by Anonymous George

How?

Submitted by WareKala on Wed, 2005-07-06 08:08.

I think it would be good if I got a notification when a download was finished. Of course, everything should be configurable and user should be able to disable the notifications altogether. But how do you make a notification for such appear in the panel? Especially, when I'm not the only one who likes to have the panel disappear automatically. Btw, I have no idea how people react to anything under XP...
-WareKala

How exactly do "people" react by Anonymous George

Re: libnotify in GNOME Applets

Submitted by Anonymous George on Tue, 2005-07-05 10:08.

Benedikt Meurer (one of the XFCE hackers) makes some good points about this system on his blog: "I wonder why thinks have to be that complicated all the time. Why not simply design a desktop notification system based on the ideas used in system notification - namely syslog."

"Speaking from the flexibility's point-of-view. You have different, pre-defined levels of importance. And you have various services, like Thunderbird or the battery monitor, that want to present notifications. Now the user can choose based on the level and the service, how to present the notification (e.g. popup notification for events from the battery monitor, and simple, non-disturbing, systray notification for Thunderbird events)."

"All events will be logged and it's possible for the user to access/clear this log. In addition, you could allow the services to tag their messages using simple strings. For example with an instant messenger, if you're only interested about online/offline popup notifications about your friend Harry, you'd add a rule to the notification server saying it should display a popup for notifications tagged with "online-state-changed", "Harry"."

"For easier usage, the notification server should allow its connected services to also modify certain settings. So, all the user would need to do is to right-click on Harry's buddy icon and toggle Tell me when Harry is online/offline."

I'll paste what I said in rep

Submitted by ChipX86 on Tue, 2005-07-05 11:52.

I'll paste what I said in reply:

"I wish for a change that people would read the specs we've being trying to get people to read before they comment on what can or can't be done.. I'll break this down.

Notifications have pre-defined levels of importance. A notification daemon could offer the user the option to filter based on this. Ours doesn't at this time. It's a simple reference implementation.

Applications send an application ID along to the notification. You could, in theory, turn off notifications inside the application. Also in theory, a daemon could let you turn them off inside the config as well, but that's a little trickier as we don't require registration for notification. However, there's also a class type that specifies the type of notification. These are standardized and a daemon could offer the ability to filter types out.

There's no reason a daemon couldn't do logging.

The one thing we may want to add later is more specific sub-types for notifications to narrow down what the user wants to see and what they don't, but they can generally get what they want by filtering the notification type.

It has been in our plans from close to the beginning to have a syslog eventually that logs each notification.

Everyone's so edgy when it comes to notifications, and the majority of the people who are against them because of "what they can't do" are people who have never even read the spec or sat down and talked with us."