unity-design team mailing list archive

[Dylan McCall <dylanmccall@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Maybe. And people always have the option of playing a sound via pulseaudio
> directly, or with libcanberra.
>
> I would however argue that 99% of the time, if you want an audio
> *notification*, you probably  want a messaging menu item, *AND* a notify-osd
> notification too.
>
> Like notify-osd bubbles, audio notifications are by definition "ethereal",
> and disappear as soon as they're gone. If something happened that's so
> important that we need a sound to tell the user... there should probably be
> an indication of what happened that's there until they dismiss it (ie, the
> messaging menu). This is especially true if you're playing audio
> notifications while the user is away from the computer, and then comes back.

Attaching a sound hint to notifications is in notify-osd's
specification (and the desktop notifications spec).

I put a patch implementing the feature here:
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/notify-osd/+bug/549900

As for tying together libnotify and the message indicator under Yet
Another library, I'm pretty worried about that idea. It would split us
further from upstreams (in a wacky, tangled way), increasing the
significant load of patches being applied and maintained within
Ubuntu.

The notifications spec (as in libnotify) is pretty expressive, and I
get the feeling that it's completely wrong that all the
implementations use a single trick for presentation (a bubble),
leaving other methods of presenting that same information to other
specifications entirely. It's like buying an assault vehicle to get
the groceries.


Dylan