unity-design team mailing list archive

[Mario Vukelic <mario.vukelic@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2010-09-16 at 17:19 +0200, Conscious User wrote:
> Because hovering your mouse over the notification does not necessarily
> mean that you have already read it. It could also mean that what you
> wanted to click on was more urgent than reading the notification or
> that you were already in the process of going there to click something
> and didn't want to stop (or simply couldn't stop, as a lot of actions
> we do in the desktop are repetitive and become automatic and lightning
> quick after a while).
> 
> At least for me, both of those cases are not rare. 

It always has and still appears to me that the notifications should not
be completely ephemeral, or rather, not all notifications should be.
Instead there should be a log of some kind where I can look up what
happened while I was away. Maybe notifications need to come in various
levels of seriousness for this to work, though, because I would indeed
not be interested to read a log of a hundred IM status changes.

But, for example, the Back in Time backup tool (easily the best desktop
PC backup tool in Ubuntu for GUI users) uses notification bubbles to
notify the user about the backup disk not being found. Which basically
forced me to set it to hourly snapshots when I installed it for a casual
user I support, because with daily snapshots the user would probably
never see the information that his USB backup disk is not mounted, which
happens.

Maybe Back in Time uses notification bubbles for something they were not
intended, though - but is there even a better way?