[Ayatana] a "radically different" solution for updates and reboot requests

[Vincenzo Ciancia <ciancia@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Paulo J. S. Silva ha scritto:
> Hi,
>
> Sorry for the long message, must I need to set some context before going
> to the point.
>
> I am trying to bring the discussion on update-manger changes, with its
> new pop-under behavior to this forum as suggested in 
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-notifier/+bug/332945/comments/384

I originarily wanted to add comments to the wiki page, but it is 
oriented to notifications while this is a specific idea for the 
notification manager, so I finally deleted it from the wiki and I post 
it here.

The proposal is very simple: still create a persistent notification in 
the notification area. However, this is not an icon, but rather a text 
in the same font of the panel menus and the user-switch applet. Clicking 
on it revelas some choices of actions to do, thus making it effectively 
a pop-up menu which appears in the notification area.

Advantages:

- it does not invade the user's own space (I like Peter's concept a lot)
- it is immediately clear what the system is saying to the user
- it is a persistent notification
- it does not interfere with alt+tab
- it effectively uses that big grey area between the notification area 
and the menus, instead of disturbing other areas of the screen

Disadvantages:

- it may be a problem on crowded panels. An option (like FUSA) would be 
necessary to change the text back into an icon.

- no overlap would be allowed hence it is good for a few critical 
applications. This can even be considered an advantage: I do not see 
other use cases than alarms (e.g. temperature high, reboot required, 
updates are available). There are very few and _likely_ if there is one 
active, we want the user to respond to that call, instead of presenting 
the next. Priorities could eventually be used (e.g. disk low will surely 
need to precede updates available or it gets stuck).

Notice that changing the text into an icon would NOT call back the 
problems that have been claimed over the notification area icon (that 
is, difficult recognisability) for the following two reasons:

1) the user has consciously changed the behaviour and has *requested* 
the icon hence surely he knows what that icon means
2) ordinary users DO NOT have a crowded panel and DO NOT NEED to change 
the setting.

Here is a screenshot

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotificationDesignGuidelines/Comments?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=text-notification.jpg

The same method can also be used by reboot requests.

> 2) Since the notifications are transient in nature, queue them in the
> indicator applet (that would require the indicator-applet to be in the
> panel by default).

I'd love this too, because the point of the update-notifier kind of 
notifications is that the system has something to say to you, and it 
wants it to be synchronous. That's instant messaging.

> Let me explain the motivation for this proposal. first, I must emphasize
> that I like the new notify-OSD framework and the will to clean up the
> notification area. I completely agree that a icon only belongs to the
> application area if it represents a running application and allows some
> constrained iteration with this application, like in media players
> (where you can skip a song, for example, without opening the full
> application). The old behavior of update-manager use it to present a
> permanent notification that is not tailored to a running application.
> This is not a good use for that area.
>
> However, pop-up or under is not a good idea either. It is usually
> considered very annoying by many users, see the hundreds of comments on
> the bug report cited above and the tens of duplicates it has.

The above summarises the mood of many.

Vincenzo