On 17 September 2010 05:21, Conscious User wrote:
Like I said, it's not necessarily a "much more important action". It
could be a very mundane action, but whose movement you couldn't stop
by reflex.
Furthermore, it is one thing to miss one notification because you were
away or not paying attention. It is another, and much more annoying,
thing to know *something* has happened and never knowing *what*.
Au contraire, they are exactly the same thing. Why should it matter if I miss a notification because I'm reading a webpage, or because I'm reading a physical written manual on my physical desk? Or what if I'm away and come back to see it just in the last half second?
The reason why NotifyOSD does not keeps a log of notifications is because you will always have a different way to know what happened. Notifications can be ethereal because they are redundant. If there's no way to know what happened without reading it in the available 5 seconds, then you really should keep a log to recover previous notifications.
Also, with my heuristic you wouldn't know something has happened while you're active, the notification would wait until you made a small pause in your work - right when you're ready to read it. That's much more humane than interrupting what you're doing.
I think you are proposing a *very simple* heuristic to guess *very
complex* thoughts.
Those are the best heuristics! :-) The important thing is that it provides a consistent, predictable behavior to notifications.
You won't be afraid that a bubble will appear right over your target on the screen, which was your original worry. The heuristic doesn't need to second-guess whether your intentions were important or trivial, it works well in both cases.
> Actually there's a really simple fix that would solve both your
> problem and the one of obscuring graphical applications, and it's
> this: don't ever show a notification while the user is working on
> something else. The way to detect the user work must be heuristic, but
> there are some good clues to it:
>
I can be typing very fast... to copy a recipe of cake my grandmother
sent me. I can be constantly moving the cursor... to play a flash
game. I can be working at a fast pace... because I had one coffee
too many, not necessarily because the task is important.
I though we already established that notifications are even less important than the least important of the user tasks? That's the only possible justification for them being ethereal.
I think it was Jef Raskin who said that you should treat user input as sacred. I concur, and that can be extended to the user focus of attention.
If the notification is important enough to interrupt the user flow then a transient bubble notification is not the place for it, it should create a persistent warning in the panel.
In the examples you mention there's not a single reason to show a notification that couldn't be better placed as a state change in the menus. As I said, you're treating notifications as more important that they really are, and that's creating problems to the design because it conflicts with the 'ethereal' goal.