A brief notification

Software

Brrr! the trunk is frozen

The bug hunting and stabilization period is starting to pay off. Those days I’ve taken the systemtray and the notification system as a target and started hammering on it…

The target were mosty two

  • Slash the count of bugs related to notifications… and 13 were closed, other 13 remains, most of them can be probably be closed as well, just need to wait and see how the last patches behave in the various situations.
  • Refine and take into shape a neat little feature entred just 2 days before te freeze, that by itself closes several bugs too.

So, what it is? sometimes notifications pop up when the pc is unattended, sometimes is something not important at all and if it gets lost in oblivion who cares, sometimes it could be quite important, for instace somebody on IM attempted to contact you and now he is offline, maybe it’s the case to write him/her an email uh?

Now notifications, while they behave exactly as before, being displayed for a short time and then disappearing, they are also “archived” for a short time (varying depending if the pc is used or not) and they are separed by application, so it’s easy to look inside all the old notifications of kopete for instace.

new notifications

This screenshot shows the notifications popup of the systemtray opened: the user asked to see all the kopete notifications, so only them are visible, even tough there were some from kmail too.

Is not the first time the user switches to the kopete notifications: the oldest two were already present the time before, so now they appear “collapsed”, while the newest ones are open.

17 thoughts on “A brief notification

  1. the_madman

    I had an idea about the notification area: making the notifications scroll, in the same manner the RSSNow widget does. How feasible is that? Would it be better or worse then what’s going into it?

    Reply
  2. eMerzh

    Hi …
    Good news…. i always have the pbm with kate trying to notify the opening of 50 files from a remote location at boot time…
    the notifications just produce an huge black bloc with no readable info….

    hope this behavior will be fixed with that patch…

    thanks anyway for your big work!

    Reply
  3. Milian Wolff

    Hey, could you maybe try to make it more clear that the two lower notifications shown in the screenshots are collapsed? I first thought that they are just empty == a bug.

    Other than that, nice work.

    Reply
  4. binarylooks

    Notifications are shaping up nicely in kde. One problem:
    I never now where the new ones are. Top or bottom? I mean it is not clear by the design of the boxes. They have shadows that indicate things are behind each other. I think it is confusing. Maybe the edges should be redesigned so that everything is together in a big box with lines in between?

    Reply
  5. binarylooks

    One other thing. The indicator says 6 at the bottom, but i only have 5 boxes of notifications?

    (Reminds me of the netbook saying “1 application running” when it actually means there is an additional activity available. Confusing.)
    For the rest. Great work!

    Reply
  6. Adriano ML

    Although we are already in feature freeze, the notification stack could get used of some space optimization.
    Grouping the same type of notification (there is too much space wasted with “Kopete Messenger”) and some more compact design could really make it shine on KDE SC 4.4.

    Reply
  7. Mark

    Good to see that notifications are taking shape. What seems missing is a better solution for file operations. I guess that is nothing for freeze, but may be later. A few days ago I had the idea that file operations would better if they were similar to a printer queee. The notification in its normal state would only show the total number of operations going on and finished. If I start a new one, it is added to the existing notification. If I click on more, it will then show a differenciated notifications by device or by type (copy, delete, move). Then there would be also the possibility to click on “change”, which then would open a window with a list of all operations by folder and file, allowing to delete items or change priority or place in the queue.

    Reply
  8. dimsuz

    Great work. The only thing that strikes me is that *ALL* archived notifications are shown when a new one arrives.

    Why not just show arrived one, like it was earlier?

    And if user wants to review archived list, he surely can do that by hitting a “number”-indicator in a systray.

    IMO that would be very nice. Or is it something that’s yet to come? 🙂

    Reply
  9. Lionel Chauvin

    When I see a such list, I can not help but close the empty notifications. Imo, it means that it is a broken UI design.

    Reply
  10. maninalift

    Good stuff, little improvements to frequently used things like notification area make a big difference to the user.

    I have to agree with Adriano ML that when you are on the “Kopete Messenger” tab it seems redundant to have “Kopete Messenger” at the top of every message. What might be very helpful when looking though the messages from one application (as in the screenshot) is to have the time stamp (or how long ago the message arrived) for each message in the heading (where the application name is repeated at the moment).

    I also think that “dimsuz” might be right that when a new message arrives and the previous messages have been closed, it would be clearer if only the new message were shown.

    Reply
  11. Marco Martin

    well, when a new notification arrives, only new ones are shown, that screenshot shows the user explicity digging in the kopete ones, but when a new one arrives the tabbar is on the “recent” tab and it behaves exactly like befre, not showing the old ones

    Reply
  12. Rufus D

    Hi there!
    Looks interesting, however, I have one issue from a usability POV:

    You screenshot looks like “when I push the Recent button, the Recent notifications are shown” (which makes sense). OTOH, it goes on like “when I push the KMail button, kmail’s notifications are hidden; when I un-push the Kopete button, kopete’s notifications are shown”.
    That doesn’t make sense.
    Best wishes,
    Rufus

    Reply
  13. dcrabs

    Hi
    I am running KDE 4.4 since a while and I must say now in the beta the notification became really annoying. The “recent notifications” window stays on top and doesn’t disappear and even worse I have to uncheck every single notification in the list, when I expand it. It’s very uncomfortable. You have to click at least twice to close them.
    Additionally, it covers permanently the buttons of the window beneath.

    Reply
  14. Ugh

    I can’t stand the recent notifications feature. It gets in my way more than it is any useful to me. I wish there was a way to disable it…

    Reply

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