unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jacob Peddicord <jpeddicord@xxxxxxxxxx>]

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