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Re: [Ayatana] Things I have noticed



On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 3:29 PM, Natan Yellin <aantny@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Even if most Ubuntu users aren't at all tech savvy, you can't annoy the small minority which are power users. Those are the people who may decide to get involved in development and submit patches, so their opinion is critical to your success.

How about, for starters, adding a gconf option to show an X icon on notifications. I personally think it makes sense not to have one, but if people want one then you should let them have it. (And normal users, who you're trying to train to use notifications in a specific way, will never turn on the X because they don't even know what gconf is.)

Either way, thanks a lot for all of the work that you guys have done so far! It's great to see Canonical getting involved and trying to improve the user interface.

Natan

A close button I personally don't see being useful, in the current state of how notifications are displayed. They come and go relatively quickly, and by the time you notice a notification to click the X it may have already disappeared.

Actions would be the obvious argument for a hidden option, but this has already been debated to death.

I can think of plenty of other options that would be nice though:
 - Positioning and size
 - Default expiration time
 - Theming? Different colored backgrounds/font color, etc for those with different GTK themes
 - Stacking notifications vs queuing. The default behavior is to queue up notifications and display them one after another, though with an active Gwibber you might have non-stop notifications appearing. The ability to have them stack on top of another, possibly with a limit of how many could be on the screen at once (as a user-configurable/gconf setting?) would be nice.

I have to admit, when I first saw notify-osd a few months ago, I hated it. But now that more applications are supporting the system, it feels *a lot* better -- not perfect, but better.

Jacob Peddicord
http://jacob.peddicord.net