icon-only case, new bar-rendering
I just added support for the icon-only layout-case and updated the bar-rendering (used for displaying a value, e.g. brightness or volume) to notify-osd. The screencast below is driven by a shell-script using notify-send, thus the combination of bubbles does not reflect a “real world”-scenario you’ll encounter.
(click to play back, ogv/theora, ~3 MBytes)
Giving a brief update of visible progress in notify-osd is something I hope to do more frequently now. Doing this is eating precious time, but I hope the bling-hungry folks in the community enjoy it.
February 24th, 2009 at 8:05 am
Nothing like bling before breakfast
great work. Using the new notify work on jaunty and its great.
February 24th, 2009 at 8:34 am
i see you blur the background of the notifications. i otherwise don’t believe my graphics card is capable of blurring so quickly. maybe i’m wrong. Otherwise i hope somehow you can detect if the card is capable of doing it or not so that those notifications don’t take too much CPU or are too slow on a bit older computers.
February 24th, 2009 at 9:39 am
Sounds great!
Are there any plans to make notifications picked up the desktop theme?
I know that you are probably swamped with work (everyone want’s bling from the king), but what is the status of LowFat?
Looking forward to more frequent blog posts and more amazing stuff landing in Ubuntu.
//MadsRH
February 24th, 2009 at 9:49 am
Mirco, the theme you use is excellent!
What about making it Ubuntu’s default?
(Is it Dust?)
February 24th, 2009 at 10:13 am
Nice, but I think the previous bar-rendering was more explicit and nicer.
February 24th, 2009 at 11:10 am
Looks great! I was pleasantly surprised by the notifications in Jaunty, after expecting to not like them. Good work on the bling
Any pointers to the window border and gtk theme you’re using?
February 24th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
@emmanuel: The blur behind the notification-bubbles is achieved via compiz’ blur-plugin. That will only work and be enabled if you are running compiz with that plugin enabled. It is only within the control of the user if the blur-plugin is enabled.
@MadsRH: No, there are currently no plans to have notifications pick up more than the icon-theme (implicit) and font-settings (implicit). lowfat is on a hold for a long time now. There’s just no time left over :/
@mangar: Yes it’s "Dust". What’s the current story about the theme I actually don’t know. I’m not following that discussion right now.
@michele: The code for that is still in notify-osd revision 197. So you can extract that and reuse it if you want
@Jon: It’s a community-provided theme called "Dust".
February 24th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Well if this goes upstream I think many many people will like it, so the time was put to good use
February 24th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
I’m trying to use this notification daemon on another distribution. However, it seems that I do not have the font installed, so it defaults to a very ugly font. Can you point me to the right font?
Thanks
February 24th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
@Sander: notify-osd, the new notification-daemon, will use whatever font you’ve set in your gnome-appearance-properties. There is no "right" or "wrong" … this is all just a matter of taste … at least for the font
Just want to avoid any endless arguments regarding the built-in style used for the notification-bubbles.
February 24th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
I really like the look of it.
February 24th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
bah @ dust, shiki colors is way nicer
February 24th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Bling-ey!
I like that the notifications in your screencast respect the desktop struts and don’t overlap the GNOME panel (unlike in Mark’s recent screenshots).
I’m find the instant-almost-disappearance on mouse-over a bit startling. Is that the final design, or do you plan to add a more graceful fadeout, say, 0.4 seconds long?
Your blog clears my name and comment if I get the devilish-ly complicated captcha wrong, or press ‘new ID’. I don’t know why I bother…
February 24th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
I think the dissapearance is fine, because you only move the mouse there to do something - and you don’t want to wait. It looks startling in the screencast, but I’m pretty sure it works out fine when you’re using it.
I am worried though - is the blur plugin activated when you enable desktop effects by default? I don’t think it is, so people will be missing out on this feature…
February 24th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
Well, it seems that something is going wrong then. These are my fonts settings: http://www.avirulence.org/settings.png and this is what the notifications look like: http://www.avirulence.org/notification.png
It still looks like the notify-osd uses another font.
February 24th, 2009 at 11:03 pm
@Marius: At the moment the desktop struts is read out only once. It needs to be made dynamic, I know. Regarding the instant fade on mouse-over, Vadim provided the correct rational behind the fade-speed. Hm… every now and then I try one of the captcha’s I never get them wrong … maybe my mind is to twisted to consider it being difficult
@Vadim: No it’s not. Sofar only a decent nvidia-card - like a GeForce 6×00 and up (using the proprietary driver) - can nicely do the blur without a performance hit. While it works e.g. on intel-based GPUs too (using the MipMap-method) it’s to heavy for these GPUs still. The behind-bubble-blur is something that is meant to just work, if your system and setup easily allows you to run it. Otherwise (if the blur plugin is not enabled) it does not cause any performance hit at all.
@Sander: Have you changed your font-settings _after_ you started your session? At the moment notify-osd does not adapt to this dynamically yet. It will do so, once I get to that bullet-point in my ToDo list
For the meantime you can just "killall -15 notify-osd" and on the next notification arriving a new instance of notify-osd will be spawned and pick up the changes. Also hinting and subpixel-order are not explicitly taken into account by notify-osd. Also another point on my ToDo-list
February 25th, 2009 at 12:14 am
MacSlow: No, I haven’t changed it after I started my session. I even tried restarting X (and Gnome). I still think it uses a different font (or do you think that my screenshots indicate that the problem is caused by a lack of hinting settings? I’m not 100% sure).
BTW. I hope you’re not taking this as criticism, I really like the stuff in your movies. Is there any way that I do some debugging? Catch command line output or something similar?
February 25th, 2009 at 3:51 am
MacSlow u are the MAN….
February 25th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
You should update the mime type for your .ogv file to be application/ogg so that it will play directly in the browser.
February 25th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
@Christopher: Afaik I’ve to do that server-side. I don’t have the needed access-privileges to do that.
February 27th, 2009 at 12:11 am
@Christopher: Got in contact with the servers overlord and now it works as the mimetype-settings were updated.
February 27th, 2009 at 1:09 am
Great job mate! (your captcha is fucking annoying!)
March 1st, 2009 at 12:59 pm
Hi,
great work on the new notifications! On a side note, can you reveal what font you’re using on the desktop?
March 1st, 2009 at 9:04 pm
@toni: The font face is called Candara and comes from a Vista system. Furthermore I use slight hinting, subpixel-antialiasing and RGB subpixel-ordering.