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..
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September 23rd, 2004 - 20:37
I would really like this future, I think it’s really nice and beautiful.
September 23rd, 2004 - 21:06
Yes, I have read the longhorn spec, it has good ideas indeed. I want to figure out practical user cases as well. What we need now is real world examples of applications which could show these – so that they are [i]useful.[/i]
One thing I have been thinking about is “shortcuts” – much like web with links to other sites. The [url=http://tigert.gimp.org/log/archives/2004/09/23/beagle-tiles/]previous blog entry of mine[/url] had an excellent comment that Beagle should also [i]link inside the document[/i] so that when you search, and open a result file, it would also [i]jump to the relevant place[/i] inside the document, and could even hilight the search word for you.
So what could be useful is the shortcuts. You get an email, if the person is online, the notification should have a “IM” link in addition to the “reply” etc..
September 23rd, 2004 - 21:40
The expanding notifications in the longhorn spec is one of the things that disturbed me about their spec, but I may be in the minority here
We could display the summary text in the notification and display the body on hover. That could end up being a UI thing, rather than in the spec. What do you think?
September 23rd, 2004 - 22:33
Maybe it’d be best to have 3 notification types for user visible notifications:
1. Rich content notification summary
2. Rich content notification
3. Text-only notification summary
They all make sense imo, the first two for immediate user visible notifications and the last one for the “notification log”, so I can easily check what happened while I was away instead of having to browse a log full of rich content summaries. Lets take a download job for example:
Rich content *summary*: Download finished!
Text-only summary: Download from “http://www……tar.gz” finished in 53 seconds at 137.4kb/s average, the file was saved to “/home/kl/….tar.gz”
The rich content *non*-summary notification may want to present what happened in yet another way, say a folder icon instead of “saved to”, a hyperlink for the target folder, a clock icon, just the file name instead of the URL..
It may sound like overkill, but this may or may not replace some of syslog’s functionality.
September 23rd, 2004 - 23:55
whatever you do, don’t make it work like that example
I’ve seen a ton of morphing windows like that, where as soon as you go to click something, the window morphs and the widget you were trying to click moves. then you try and re-aim and the window morphs back to the original, etc etc.
If you made it grow around the original notification, so the existing widgets don’t move, that would be better
September 24th, 2004 - 05:50
Tuomas, your ideas for the Notifications the last few posts have been great!
I would love to see these examples present in future versions of GNOME. This is something that I’ve wanted for a long time. Your thoughts on the problem of “internet distraction” are right on! I agree with Karsten’s comments, but would further like to have the freedom to customize the notifications, i.e.: font type/size, icons, color/background/transparency, window sizing/placement, appearance time, etc. This would enable myself (and others) to customize the reduction of “distraction.” Maybe this is too much? Just my thoughts for the conversation. Thanks.
September 24th, 2004 - 07:37
Yeah, I know the moving labels are a problem – for example the longhorn spec stresses very strongly that it shouldnt happen and I agree. Any good ideas how to solve the issue without making the layout backwards with the title on bottom?
It is not that these are supposed to be perfect. This probably is more or less equivalent to thinking aloud while I try to get ideas how these things should work. Not all of the ideas are exactly great
But I hope they evolve to something useful.
Thanks for everybody for the good suggestions!