unity-design team mailing list archive

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Conscious User wrote on 31/03/11 18:57:
>...
> In Natty, the Ubuntu One item was moved from the Me Menu from
> the Messaging Menu. Was this agreed on by the design team?

Not as far as I know. I reported a bug about it that was marked Invalid.
<http://launchpad.net/bugs/740340>

After that, I discussed it with the Ubuntu One tech lead. I suggested
that Ubuntu One use its own indicator menu, which glows when there are
share invitations, and otherwise just animates slowly when syncing. As
long as it's in the messaging menu it can't show sync progress, without
being present in the launcher too -- which both consumes a lot of space
in the launcher for something that really isn't that important, and
means Ubuntu One status is being shown in two (or one-and-a-half)
different places on the screen.

> If it was, I think this is a good opportunity to wonder if
> there is still a point in trying to tie the Messaging Menu
> to messaging applications only.
> 
> Currently, the messaging menu is the desktop resource that
> covers that case where notifications require response but
> not necessarily immediate. The no-response case is covered
> by the bubbles and the immediate response case is covered
> by unfocused dialog boxes, or whatever will replace them
> (the never implemented "morphing boxes" in the specification
> or the IDO thingies that Empathy is using now) in the future.
> 
> The existence of libindicate is something that has always
> bothered me. The not-necessarily-immediate-response case
> is a common scenario required by a significative number of
> applications, and requiring those applications to support
> an extra library (and thus extra patching for working in
> Ubuntu) is unpleasant.
> 
> Shouldn't this case be covered by the Notification Spec and
> each desktop offer a standard single mechanism for handling
> them, independently of the app? Shouldn't the Messaging Menu
> drop the "messaging app" requirement and become the standard
> Ubuntu mechanism for handling these kind of notifications?
>...

The idea that all non-immediate "notifications" should be grouped
together in a single place, regardless of topic, is very much like the
idea that progress for all long-running tasks should be grouped together
in a single place regardless of task. It's the kind of categorization
that may make perfect sense to engineers, but to others it risks looking
like a jumble of unrelated things.

One of the motivations behind the introduction of Notify OSD was to
encourage applications to use general-purpose notification systems less
often. Notifications of things are more helpful if they are closer to
those things, for example embedded in relevant windows.

- -- 
mpt
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