Comments on: Gnome “Notification” ideas..

By: Pasi Savolainen

Pasi Savolainen — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 17:12:33 +0000

FWIW, I saw your idea (timing-out popup) and implemented it for an application of my own (a gmail notifier). You can see it in a screenshot here. Application itself is wmgmail. (it's nothing much, but the idea really came from this entry).

By: Ross

Ross — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 17:45:15 +0000

If this ends up using some sort of browser widget (gecko or some some such) to display the HTML, you also open the door to some very interesting miniapps that could popup and take user input through form fields and process it somehow.

By: sil

sil — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 16:01:17 +0000

I see the theory, but surely this kind of notification would come from a background daemon or something? Something that’s running all the time and wants to notify you if something changes (like the stock prices in your example). Would long-running daemons use zenity? Surely they’d call some function in the Gnome API to do a notification. I love the idea, personally (because I do write daemons in bash) but not everyone does.
Incidentally, being able to display arbitrary HTML in a small window like that is a big step towards a Gnome version of the Mac’s Dashboard (or, indeed, a more user-friendly gDesklets)…

By: michel

michel — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 15:29:14 +0000

here, it’s simply ONE EXAMPLE of use of zenity with a notification.

it would be very good, and of course you can notify what _YOU_ want.

By: Tuomas

Tuomas — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 14:42:08 +0000

Stephane: These are not intrusive: One main point is that they should never ever steal your keyboard focus. They appear on a corner or something, stay for a while (which the timer indicator shows) and then fade away. If you dont care about it, do nothing and it disappears anyway. So while it appears on the screen, it does nothing else. That’s the biggest problem with Gaim and other instant messaging tools, battery notifications, everything on Linux that tries to notify the user with a dialog. They get in your face too much. This is an attempt to solve the problem by making notifications that do it without distrupting your work. Also, there could be a mechanism to set yourself “busy” thus no notifications will appear at all. Also your DVD player could set a “fullscreen presentation” flag on the desktop so only stuff like “Dude, you run out of battery in 10 seconds!” get through

That’s the big idea. But got to take small steps to get there..

Sunspire: Yeah, I have seen the page, it was very good. Thanks for the tip anyway

By: Sunspire

Sunspire — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 14:38:32 +0000

Take a look at the
Aero Notifications Guidelines. It’s only prudent to know what the “competition” is up to. There’s some really clever ideas in there in my opinion, such as the expansion on hover.

By: Big Ray

Big Ray — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 14:31:26 +0000

That would be dope! I can think of a billion uses for your idea.

By: Stephane Loeuillet

Stephane Loeuillet — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 14:17:31 +0000

as with any such intrusive notification (covers a big part of the screen), a checkbox to not trigger it anymore (at least in current session) would be good or it would be as anoying as a pop-up in while surfing the web.

no need for that of course for notifications that are 2 text-line high and located on the borders of the screen

that were my 2cts

By: Fredrik Hedberg » Gnome Notify

Fredrik Hedberg » Gnome Notify — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

[...] Timeout = 4000; proxy.Notify(notification); Or if you wanna do it from the shell. Like Toumas suggested, the CLI client also take files as input where applicab [...]