On 17 September 2010 14:18, Matthew Paul Thomas
wrote:
Diego Moya wrote on 17/09/10 07:10:
> 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.
Well, Jef had some odd ideas about user input and focus of attention. He
thought, for example, that error messages should behave rather like
Notify OSD bubbles, undismissable and gradually fading, but that there
should be a keyboard command to adjust their transparency ("The humane
interface", pp116-117 <http://ur1.ca/1nklv>). And he thought it would
make sense to insert incoming e-mail messages into whatever document you
were editing at the time (p176 <http://ur1.ca/1nkq9>).
Yes, those bubbles are actually quite similar to what NotifyOSD tries to do. But look how Jef required a way for the user to take control of how bubbles are presented. He also thought that "a document that stores all messages for later retrieval is essential". The Ayatana notification design took the original idea and then changed it to its opposite by removing every safeguard feature to put user in control and keep it humane.
The current design for OSD notifications is heavily modal - it blocks access to the visible area until the bubble disappears, and it doesn't give the user a way to claim that blocked area. The provided workaround to reach the blocked screen area requires a complex interaction (the repeated fading out and in as the mouse moves away) that can be quite distracting and doesn't work if the user needs the cursor elsewhere. That's why I support a way to interact directly with the notification, either by pricking the bubble or allowing the user to place it somewhere else. Turning the bubble into an object by allowing direct manipulation would make it not blocking, and thus non modal.
As for the curious mail receptions in Jef's book, this was for a system where the whole stored information was a few strokes away through instant search, so moving it to an archive would be as trivial as cut-n-paste. Also have in mind that this design was probably tested on the Canon Cat, in an era way before the Eternal September and spam.
> 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.
>...
Persistent warning, yes. In the panel, usually not. :-)
<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotificationDesignGuidelines>
Ok, I was thinking of applications that log their notifications to the information menus.