unity-design team mailing list archive

[Vincenzo Ciancia <ciancia@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Il giorno lun, 27/04/2009 alle 15.47 +0100, Mark Shuttleworth ha
scritto:
> Martin Pitt wrote: 
> > Hello,
> > 
> > just received an interesting comment about notify-osd, and some
> > deficiencies which come up a lot:
> > 
> >   http://martinpitt.wordpress.com/2009/02/23/the-stracciatella-gnome-session/#comment-364
> > 
> >   
> 
> The comment right after is interesting, too :-)

Sorry for jumping in the middle of threads I perhaps didn't read
entirely, but all these "judgments" on  notifications and pop-unders are
in my opinion missing two important points and a minor one

important n. 1) notifications disappear. That's by design. However,
since I installed jaunty, I have seen a notification bothering me with
some "this network is .local something and this is bad" long message
that I never managed to read (fancy understanding it) every time I
connect to the local network. I have no way to let the notification stay
longer (e.g. mouseover) and I have no way to find it in a message log of
some sort. I just feel irritated by a message that appears and does not
leave me the time to understand it. And I am patient with computers, you
can imagine my mother. She just would not care about reading such a
message. But perhaps you're already addressing these points.

important n. 2) pop-ups and pop-unders, even minimised windows, break
the alt+tab order, hence they are doomed to disturb the user.

less important) even though one may click "trough" the notification, I
fear that users will not understand this and just wait for the
notification to disappear: there is no other case of "click-transparent"
window that I know of, hence I don't expect users to trust that they can
really click "below" an existing window, even if it looks transparent.
Perhaps avoiding mouse (by moving) would be better, but it would also
look a bit funny in the negative sense of it.


Vincenzo