On Wednesday 23 September 2009, Aurélien Gâteau wrote: > Hi, > > I would like to present to you some work I have been doing for Canonical > regarding notifications in Plasma. > > Before going further, let me state that my goal with this mail is not to > get this work incorporated upstream, as I understand the Plasma project > have a different position than Canonical on the subject of notifications. > I decided to write this mail because I believe it is more correct to let > you know about it in a more "personal" way rather than you discovering > it in a blog post or a Kubuntu review. > > This work provides an implementation of Ayatana notifications for Plasma > (Ayatana is the name of a Canonical project to improve user experience > on Ubuntu and derivatives). Ayatana notifications have the following > characteristics:
every other consideration aside, i feel that it would have been -far- easier to mantain if the systray patch just consisted in notifications disabling and provide a totally separate daemon for that kind of notifications > - Notifications are queued instead of stacked. This helps reduce the > "spamming" feeling. > > - Notifications are passive: they do not feature actions or close > buttons. This is probably the most controversial bit. > > - Since notifications are passive, they are click-through: when you move > the mouse over them, they fade away to become almost transparent and let > you click through them to reach any underlying window. > > - Since they do not need any interactivity interface, they are drawn > using Plasma tooltip SVG. > > Here are (slightly outdated) screenshots of what they look like: > > http://people.canonical.com/~agateau/plasma-ayatana-notifications/powerdevi >l.png > http://people.canonical.com/~agateau/plasma-ayatana-notifications/kopete.pn >g > > An important point: While the patch is integrated in Kubuntu, the > default behavior is to use KDE notifications. The user can switch to > Ayatana notifications through an option of the system tray configuration > dialog (there are even preview buttons to help the user decide). > > http://people.canonical.com/~agateau/plasma-ayatana-notifications/configura >tion.png > > I attached a patch for you to test if you feel so inclined. I updated it > this morning to latest trunk. It is a single large patch because I > believe it is easier to try it this way, but if you are interested in > the incremental steps, you can find a patchset tarball here: > > http://people.canonical.com/~agateau/plasma-ayatana-notifications/ > > As I said I do not expect this to be merged but I would be very happy if > some of you just gave it a try for a few hours and maybe find some > interesting ideas in it. The queuing and click-through features in > particular could be interesting. > > I was quite skeptic about the idea of passive notifications first, but > have since changed my mind after using them for a while. I believe this > new approach needs to be tried for one to make an informed opinion on > it. The feedback I got from Kubuntu Karmic users is varied: some like it > a lot, other don't. > > Please let me know your opinion on this. > > Regards, > Aurélien -- Marco Martin _______________________________________________ Plasma-devel mailing list Plasma-devel@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
