tigert.com | my life and stuff um, what do I write here?

Evolving..

Chris Lee made a suggestion to avoid the jumping contents of the popup:

I think it makes sense, although it might look a bit strange to have the title at bottom. But worth a thought anyway. Thanks Chris!

And yes, the expanded note shouldnt be that wide. Consider it a Gimping error

The Revenge of Killer Mutant Notifications..

Okay. More thought. I wonder if this is a bad idea.. to have a small notification that is very simple and small, but would possibly expand when mouse is moved over it to display more content. This way it does not cover much of the screen, but in some situations it might be nice to also have additional stuff available.

In this case, our user is listening to a mp3 stream from a net radio. All of a sudden there's this very neat song going on. The music player shows a quick notification with the song title (that is streamed along the music to the music player). Now, our user [i]wants that tune on CD[/i] since it is so cool. Mouseover, and show additional info with for example a link to the musicmatch website or something that has more info about the artist:

Also the same popup could show when mouse is over the status icon. Of course this would not work for everything, and I am not even sure if it is a good idea. Basically this is a mockup I did for myself to fuel my brain, so I thought I'd share it.

One of the problems I wish to solve with the notifications is the problem of "internet distraction" while working on something. Lets say I am waiting for an important mail from my boss regarding my Boston visit. I can set Evolution to notify me of all the mails from my boss, since those usually are something important - so I do not need to check my inbox every few minutes. Better concentrate on the work and get a notify when the mail actually arrives. Now, if the notification also showed a few first lines of the message body (and a "view message" button) it might be all I needed to know - again freeing me from switching to Evolution completely. Very often when you go check mail you get another interesting mail which leads you to think other stuff, further taking you away from what you were originally doing. Then again, maybe I'm the only person on the earth having this problem

Of course part of this information could just as well show up on a Dashboard side panel. Depends. We just need to get programs to use the notifications so we get a better idea what they are good for and we know what stuff works better on Dashboard etc..

Beagle tiles..

Nat, Trow?

What if Beagle would display a snippet of the document content along with the searched term? It could show the first match with a small snippet of content before and after - this way it might be faster to find the one you are looking for. No need to open each one to see what's inside..?

Google does this for searches and it is pretty useful.

Notifications again..

Christian: I think we really should define the notification "body" be HTML in the spec.. HTML is familiar and works okay for layout and it would give more possibilities for the application writer or a user writing scripts with notification support.

Also, we do not have many real-world examples of this stuff yet. Well, there is MSN Messenger and a few other things, and we know battery alerts could be useful, sure. New mail notifications, stock alerts, maybe. But when we talk about something really different, perhaps something we havent thought about yet, how do we know what is needed in the spec? If the spec is very liberal in terms of the layout and message content, it will not be the limiting factor later.

Why dont we just make the spec define that the message content can be HTML, according to some suitable w3c dtd. The notification implementations then should just strip off stuff they dont understand, thus making the currently proposed bold, italic etc work just fine, but without limiting the use to more interesting content. Also if we used Gecko, one could do the layout with CSS and it would be easy to theme the look. That would be very nice in my opinion.

So lets go for rich content..

Presence, contacts and different apps..

So, I installed Skype, the free-as-in-beer web phone software (which now has a beta for OSX btw) and I have had some fun with Jimmac - it is nice to be able to just chat about work and stuff instead of typing it on irc.

But this all has made me think about integration again. Let's see. I have my mail addressbook in Evolution, I have a buddy list in Gaim, my friends are also on IRC and people are writing blogs and appearing on Planet Gnome as well. Some people are also in my Gnomemeeting list. Keeping track of all this - without doing it as a full-time job - is not easy. There's just too much information and it is split between different applications..

The Evolution addressbook now has fields for messaging client screen names etc, and there was work going on to make Gaim sync with that which is great. But now, for example, Skype just has its own list of contacts.

Maybe there is a standard being drafted for all this - if someone knows, let me know.

When Jimmac becomes online, I wish I got[i] one notification bubble[/i] for it, which gives me a list of applications that I can use to contact him. Not popups and small funny sounds from Gaim, Skype, Evo, XChat, Gnomemeeting and whatever else I might be running. And I also wish to have [i]just one control to set myself "busy"[/i] - nobody wants to do it on each of the apps separately..