small HowTo for notifications

Although the page about notification development guidelines isn’t done yet, I’ve finished the C, Python and C#-examples provided there. These examples are self-contained and act as a good copy&paste source for anybody who wants to adapt existing or new code to the jaunty notifications. You’ll see correct checking of daemon capabilities and name. For a better overview of the different layout-cases screenshots are shown too. I’ll try to complete that page this week.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 6:38 am and is filed under notifications, ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “small HowTo for notifications”

  1. Milho Says:
    February 25th, 2009 at 1:49 pm

    Great progress MacSlow,

    I just read through the wiki page and one thing that pop to my eye is the already discussed interaction issue.

    The design thesis was: a notification should not interfere with what you do. That’s why you can’t click it.
    That’s ok. I would like to be able to click it since it is my decision but I get the point that a notification should not be a distraction because distraction cost valuable time and interrupt your work (reference to Randy Pausch’s time-management lecture).

    Now that I read on I read something like:
    "…should open unfocused directly, and request attention."

    Now that is a big distraction to me. Plus it is a even worse design flaw - to my mind - if windows open them self without prior (direct, "virtual") action of the user. Just take the M$ USB drive behavior. The autosearch dialog comes, and when you "kill it dead" then there are (brainless) options you can do with your drive. Very annoying since a user normally knows why he did plug something into something. So he might also know if he want to configure something or work with something in a way. Why is this dialog saying: "I’m smarten then you, because I know what you want".
    A notification with a proposing to interact is design wise the best way to handle this. While still in contrast to the "non-disturbing" design of notifications. But you have to stick to one side, Luke :-)

    My 0.5 cent.

  2. VM Says:
    March 2nd, 2009 at 1:07 pm

    Hi!

    I cant’t find any info about how to draw a progress bar in notifications, can you give a brief example in python or C ?

  3. hellzou Says:
    March 20th, 2009 at 3:31 pm

    what i dislike about those notifications :
    - just one notification at a time
    - slow to show up
    - too much space on the top of it (space for a panel i don’t have)

  4. MacSlow Says:
    March 24th, 2009 at 3:28 pm

    @ hellzou: This is not the place for bug-reports or wishlist items. Please do that at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/notify-osd

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