Alex Launi wrote:
Yes, I agree. We can get it right in main, in Universe we are dependent on the level of interest and support for the idea from Ubuntu developers and upstreams. That's why I think these discussions are important; they help to test the ideas and build the level of community support for the initiative. So thank you. Now we are getting to the very interesting part of the discussion :-) I strongly believe that a feature like this is only interesting if the work that someone has to do to take advantage of it pays dividends in many different ways, in many different places. If I have to go into my email configuration and specify an email address that's "important" so that it "gives me the green dot", that's a LOT of work. On its own, the payoff (a green dot on new email from that address) isn't really worth it. ESPECIALLY if "I get frequent email from" these same people - in that case, I may as well just use the green dot to indicate ANY new mail, since there's a good chance it comes from one of those people. But what if flagging a contact as "important" was used in MANY different applications? That gets more interesting. For example, what if the IM and email apps shared an addressbook, AND they shared the "important" flag, so that marking someone as important changed the way both apps behaved. Suddenly it's more useful to garden that data. I think we would benefit greatly from asking ourselves the question "how can we make the work that people do more valuable by re-using that work across the system". For example, we are looking at increasing the perceived value of the "status" flag that is set in the top right of the screen. Currently, that's only used by your IM client. But it might also be used elsewhere, for example, "Busy" could suppress non-critical notifications. Finding, and defining, these cross-application experiences is a major goal for us in this initiative. So, any good ideas in this regard? For the moment, until we have shared addressbooks across mail and IM and other apps, I'm -1 on trying to identify contacts as "important" because I think the feature will not be compelling, discoverable or widely used. Thank you for your trust - let's keep discussing the priority idea. For the moment, I think the messaging menu will stay binary ("no queue" vs "stuff to do"). But we definitely have a priority / urgency goal for Karmic in notifications. We are turning on a debug behaviour for notify-osd so that urgency will be visible on notifications (it will be turned off again before the release) to help us identify which apps use urgency well and which abuse it. And we'll be testing various algorithms to use the notification urgency for message duration, queuing priority, and discarding in the case of an overfull queue. So there's lots of thinking to be done on the general subject of event / message urgency, and perhaps that will bring us back to the messaging menu with a different perspective. Mark |
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