unity-design team mailing list archive

[Mark Shuttleworth <mark@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Nate wrote:
> What if the notification bubbles started neatly in the corner, but
> after a moment slid down the screen and slowly faded while it moved
> down a few inches, where it would disappear?  New bubbles would pop up
> in the corner, but would slide down while their duration ran out. 
> More important bubbles might pause in the corner longer and slide
> slower. 
It's a cute idea, essentially providing subliminal feedback using the
behaviour of the bubble.

However, I would agree with Nick's followup, that movement increases the
difficulty of reading the notification (especially if it is getting
appended to while it is moving). On balance, I would try to avoid
arbitrary movement of the bubbles.

In the original design, we had a lot of "sliding bubbles", as new ones
were added (before we decided to queue them) and as older ones died (and
existing ones slid up to fill in the gaps). We came to the conclusion
that simpler was better, and ended up trying to optimise for the minimum
of sliding.

For example, we specified that appends to a higher async bubble should
be paused while a syncronous bubble was being displayed below it. So,
say Joe starts talking to you, and his comments are being appended in a
bubble in the top right. If you then hit the volume down key, you get a
syncronous bubble underneath that. If Joe talks to you while you have
that, we decided to defer the append until the volume bubble had died
and gone away so that the append wouldn't cause the volume bubble to
slide down.

In our 9.10 experiment, we will eliminate that completely, because
syncronous bubbles will ALWAYS be the same size and ALWAYS be "just
above the half-way line", while async bubbles will be "just below the
half-way line". The async bubbles might grow or shrink (with content
appending and replacement) but they won't slide around. We'll have
scrolling in the bubble, for long content and long content with appends.

Mark

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