unity-design team mailing list archive

[Luke Benstead <kazade@xxxxxxxxx>]

> In IM clients the text does not disappear , so you can take your time to
> catch up with the text.
> Try this , try reading text in an irc chat room with heavy traffic,[eg:
> #ubuntu]. You'll notice it is not easy to catch up.
>

Thinking about it, I don't believe comparisons with IM or IRC are fair
(I know, it was I who first compared to IM :p )

Both IM and IRC have a major difference in that the scrolling text is
from multiple sources (users) whereas notification bubbles come from
one source. Context switching like this will obviously take longer to
read than text from a single source. Also, the sheer quantity of text
to read in both IM and IRC is far more than your typical notification
bubble. Finally, in the notification bubble we can make the text slide
up, rather than jump up, and also fiddle with the display time and the
width of the bubble (so more text fits on a single line). I'm not
convinced that text scrolling up in the notification bubbles will
actually cause a problem.

> What we could do is:
> - Place the Async bubbles in the lower right, at a height keeping in
> mind the max[10 lines] allowed for append. So the bubble is in the lower
> right position but not exactly in the corner. This would make the
> bubbles not have a problem of scrolling text.
> - Place the sync bubbles to be in the lower center. At the same height
> as the async bubbles but centered. [Similar to where the upstream
> volume/brightness notifications are placed]
>
> -OR-
>
> - Revert back to the dynamic positioning of the bubbles and place the
> bubbles in the lower right at the height assuming for 10 lines of text.
>
>
>
> Then again we might get complaints that the bubbles are not exactly in
> the corner... ;)
>

I think either of those solutions could work. The point of my original
suggestion was that positioning at the bottom of the screen (where
there are usually fewer screen elements) should not be ruled out just
because the async bubbles will extend. I actually think Johan's
mockups look pretty nice :)

Luke.