Warning: this post belongs to the category of the evil teaser ones, that announces features for the release after the next near one 😀
KDE SC 4.4 has some improvements to the notification system, as I shown there, but still some problems remains:
The popup can still be very big, covering a big part of the screen, stealing input area or just being too big for smaller screens.
Also, being notifications and jobs shown in the same window, it automatically shows again and again the same information, being the individual job progress when a new notification arrives r vice versa.
So, things are changed a bit in trunk (so what will be 4.5) let’s look at a video worth more than 1024 words:
This is of course still subject to change a lot before 4.5 release, but it’s on the right track.
When a new notification arrives, it is shown by a popup on its own, without jobs progress. This popup only shows a notification at a time partially covering all the others (maximum 4 total) in order to save space. to see a covered notification is enough to pass the mouse over its title.
The big popup accessible by clicking the “i” button is still quite big indeed but is only shown when the user asks explicitly for it. it shows the usual individual job progress and the old notifications browser introduced in 4.4, where is possible to filter by application. Is a convenient place to search what happened to the PC when you were away for instance.
Similarly, when there are jobs running, the big popup is not shown, but only a really tiny global progress bar, that can even covered by the windows, so won’t be blocking any mouse input to precious areas of the screen.
Another nice thing is that if you compare it with widgets like The microblog plasmoid or the opendesktop ones you see that a very common design pattern is emerging for similar things, making the experience pretty consistent.
Yes, I found this combination of Plasma::TabBar, Plasma::ScrollWidget and Plasma::IconWidget very convenient, too. It’s indeed being used all over the place and works + looks nicely. I’m personally using it in Lion Mail, Crystal and Network Manager.
is there any chance of seeing this in some of the
KDE SC 4.4.x incremental updates ??? 😀
I can’t wait to use this 😀
It would be nice, to be able to have notifications in “tooltip”-style, without buttons, only textlinks, which are only max. half of the current width, and about 3/4 of current height. Perhaps as a configuration option?
This is very nice. Much nicer than the previous way.
One thing: It’s not clear from the video whether this might already be the way things work, but assuming jobs’ progress indicators no longer take so much space, maybe they shouldn’t disappear automatically? Notifications should, but I’m not so sure about jobs — with the current implementation at least I usually want to follow the progress of the job, and it always goes away after a few seconds, and so I always have to click the icon to call it back up again, which would entail having the big huge all-encompassing notifications widget rather than just the small progress indicator — which wouldn’t be good.
Also — and again I don’t know whether this might’ve already been improved upstream — but notifications/jobs shouldn’t hide themselves when the mouse cursor is over them, this usually indicates that I am reading them; in my local version they currently do.
Keep up the good work!
These new notifications and job progress indicators are waaayyyy too busy to my taste. There’s always something going on in the i-icon and it gives me headache. I hope it’ll get a bit more unintrusive (is that even a word?) in the future. I feel violated 😛
I liked a lot about that. And I must say I can not wait to get use this… But one thing striked be. The scrolling!
Please do not mke smooth scrolling to the notifications as default but make it go steps. So you get every notification to be placed to top edge. And it is easier to scroll trough watching one-by-one seeing under a second notification.
I liked too about the “flip-board” effect when hovering over notifications and they went up/down. And the progress bar popping away from the list when opening it was great.
I don’t like the current state of notifications. I suggest that static, non interactive ones (like Amarok’s), be displayed like small floating windows (like Ayatana notifications). Interactive ones should be displayed with the current design. And the notifications classifier is classy, but it shouldn’t be displayed when a notification pops up. It should be displayed only when I click in the “i” icon.
@illissius: only the tiny progressbar appears automatically and never disappears while the job is running.
Also, the noifications actually no not hide anymore when they are under the mouse cursor.
@Alejandro Nova: yes, the classifier is indeed shown only when the user clicks on the i icon now
I like the direction that the system tray notifications are going in, however, it looks like they have way too much whitespace (empty space, not necessarily white). The artists responsible for the design would do well to make it much more compact.
@Fri13 (Anonimous)
Ah yes, that sounds like a great idea. That would be nice if it were like that…except use animations for the scrolling :p
Sexy..
Hi notmart,
thanks for the great work so far (currently on 4.4, and rather happy with it)
The thing I am missing is a easy way to close one or all notifications.
So, here is what I would propose:
A middle click (as known from other applications such as firefox or dolphin or …) should close notifications. A middleclick on the notification body or title should close the notification, a middle click on the category (e.g. kmail, amarok, all) should close all notifications of this category.
Would be great when you could consider this. I can create a feature request on bugs.kde.org as well, if you would prefer voting or discussions on this.
Kind regards,
Fuchs
One problem with notifications at least in KDE 4.3 is that the theme authors assume that panel will always be at the top. Which means, the collapse button has a shape of down arrow, and it looks really confusing when I place the panel (and systray widget) on the top of the screen
I would really like to see being able to separate out running tasks and notifications.
Currently they are all together in one bar and it’s very confusing to the user. (imagine device nofitier thrown in ther also….).
I would love to see even more separation – like it’s now possible with the system tray.
Consider the following use case:
– i want my communications notifications to be displayed on desktop, similar to the microblogging widget.
– i want an expandable icon in panel for running tasks
– i want all other notifications to pop up form another icon on panel.
Hi could you also add icons (usb/hdd) for the copy process?
like if i copy from hdd to usb device the progress looks like:
HDD_ICON —-progress—- USB_ICON
same the other way too?