unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jim Rorie <jfrorie@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Friday 11,September,2009 04:52 PM, David Barth wrote:
> > It is was not on the table for Karmic, that is, Mozilla had reservations
> > last year about the non-interactivity of n-osd notifications and I think
> > they prefer to see how the rest of the community reacts to our change
> > before reconsidering a switch.
> If they're having reservations about the non-interactivity of notify-osd, how
> about making the actions optional? For example, don't show actions for
> notify-osd users (where actions aren't supported), but show actions for
> notification-daemon users, much like most of the other applications are doing.

This got me thinking of a way to kill two birds with one stone.  

The strength of the lib-notify is the unobtrusive nature of the
messages.  This is also considered one of it's weaknesses due to the
lack of interactivity.  The chief complaint that I see is that
previously we had a centralized place to respond to application
requests.  Now we appear to have broken that up and placed the burden
back on the developer.  

The weakness of this approach is that each response is different and
must be dug for or learned for each application instead of the single
click simplicity that we had before.  Having all applications be
proactive like update manager could result in a number of popdowns that
have to be dealt with on the screen at a given time.

I'm wondering if the new messaging interface might be the missing piece
to this problem?  Could we consider interactive system messages to be
an additional immutable consumer of MI? 

For example when firefox informs you that a download is completed, it
shows you a dialog that must be dealt with.  It provides quicklinks to
your downloads. Annoying at times and at others useful.  The firefox
lib-notify plugin is not annoying, but isn't as useful.  I'm notified
of the completion, but if I want that download screen in firefox, I
have to go after it either through the menu or a key combination that I
never use enough to memorize. 

So, in comes the new messaging interface.  A unobtrusive popup informs
you of your download and that there is a shortcut available to bring up
the download box.  The icon on the desktop is modified to let you know
you can interact with it.  Perhaps double clicking will bring back up
the last message opaque with buttons so you can respond directly to it.
Perhaps we'd have something more robust.    I'm not sure exactly how
but I see potential.  I'm thinking of it as interactive email from the
system.

Pros: This would provide interactivity through lib notify and quiet a chief
complaint.  Users would not be challenged to respond to notifications
within a certain time frame. It would not add more clutter as this
interface already exists.  It would use a known paradigm for receiving
messages that you use daily to check email or IM's, thus the user
should be comfortable with it.  

Cons: It might be extra steps to go through the MI instead of directly
to the application.  A new interactive MI responder must be built. 
Adding system messages might be bending the MI purpose a little.

I apologize if this idea has been brought us before, but I didn't see
anything along this vein in the archives.

*ducking*

-  
Jim Rorie

jfrorie@xxxxxxxxx
http://www.unconventional-wisdom.org
IM: jfrorie (XMPP/GoogleTalk)

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