On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 11:46, Matthew Paul Thomas
<mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>...
> Obviously, what i needed today to achieve undisturbedness i needed to
> achieve my goals in focused work was nothing less than a "Notifications
> Off" button, or even better:
> a Do Not Disturb toggle.
>...
If people are annoyed by unwanted notification bubbles from Banshee,
which do you think they'll guess the purpose of more easily?
(a) a "do not disturb" item in the me menu
(b) a "Bubbles for Track Changes" item in Banshee's "View" menu
Sure it would of course be smart to design the individual system components and applications so well, that distractions are automatically reduced to zero.
What i don't think is that every application designer will follow such guidelines, take 3rd party apps for example.
You could argue that turning off notification bubbles temporarily in
individual applications is inefficient.
On the contrary.
E.g. a "do not disturb" windicator would solve that problem, giving an application "royalty" over the screen and over the audio notifications.
Its just that more apps will learn to register themselves with the notification service in time, and more bubbles will emanate from more apps.
And apart from that, we work across apps much of the time, e.g. nautilus and totem side by side, or inkscape and gimp, you name it..
To ensure i didn't "forget" any single one of these apps, i can think of nothing easier than a button which handles *all* of them at once.
I'm not at all happy with this in Empathy; there, either bubbles are suppressed in Away *and* Busy, or they are shown in Available.
I want bubbles to show in Away, but not in Busy, but i can't set that in Empathy. DnD would handle that.
Part of the attractiveness of having IM statuses in the Me menu is that (at least in theory) they save
you from having to make the same change in multiple applications. But
that efficiency isn't much use if people won't learn it in the first place.
Having an easily discoverable easily clickable (Fitt's law) Do Not Disturb toggle in the Me Menu would make life easier for me personally, and i can't imagine i'm alone here..
To make it attractive is another task, as you imply, but i'm quite confident it is not beyond our collaborative abilities.