unity-design team mailing list archive

[Scott Kitterman <ubuntu@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 10 May 2009 16:14:25 -0500 Ted Gould <ted@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>On Sat, 2009-05-09 at 22:19 +0300, Natan Yellin wrote:
>
>> Mike is sitting at his computer and working in Inkscape when several
>> emails arrive. In the past, Mike has clicked on the indicator icon to
>> get rid of the dot but has always ignored the messages themselves.
>> Therefore, the emails are assigned low priority and the icon only
>> shows a green dot.
>> 
>> After a few minutes, Mike closes Inkscape and decides to work on his
>> latest project at work. He opens up a file that a colleague emailed
>> him and begins to edit it. The system notices that the tags on his
>> document match the tags on one of the emails that he received, so the
>> indicator icon changes to a yellow dot.
>> 
>> An hour later Mike receives another email and evolution automatically
>> inserts the email into the global database. The notifications system
>> receives is told that a new email arrived and automatically does a
>> query for similar items. It notices that the document Mike is editing
>> was sent to him by the same person who sent the new email. The
>> indicator icon turns red to reflect this, and Mike receives a relevant
>> notification.
>> [End of scenario]
>
>While I applaud Mike for using Inkscape I think that in general there is
>to much "magic" in how things are working here.  For instance, why the
>dot changed color is not obvious to the user, it basically becomes "the
>computer thinks it has something for me."  Chances are, that it won't be
>100% accurate, so people will tend to ignore it over time.
>
>I think that what might be more interesting is to look at displaying the
>tags in a document and allowing the user to explore based on those.
>That way the user is driving and exploring those relationships.  It
>isn't as good from the technology demo perspective, but it would keep
>the user feeling in control, and understand better where misses occur
>from.
>
"To much magic" was pretty much my reaction when I read this suggestion.

I don't use notifications for mail because I get far to much of it.  I have 
lots of rules I've built into my chosen mail client (Kmail).  I might be 
interested in rules to get notified if mail lands in a certain folder (it 
also occurs to me I ought to see if Kmail suppports this already).

Scott K