unity-design team mailing list archive

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Conscious User wrote on 01/04/11 18:57:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> What are your thoughts on, for example, what Jockey, PolicyKit and File
> Transfer currently do? They basically use an appindicator to persist,
> just like Update Manager did in the past with the notification area.
> Do you think this should be the standard procedure for all apps that
> do not fit in the current categories (messaging and sound)?

Absolutely not.

> If no, how should they be fixed? If yes, why not do something similar
> for Update Manager instead of popping up the window?

Designing a replacement for Jockey's menu is something I'm working on
this week. Maybe it can be merged into Update Manager, or maybe there's
a better place for it. Anyone got suggestions?
<http://launchpad.net/bugs/617392>

Even if these one-off menus were a good idea, the PolicyKit one -- like
the Jockey one -- would be more confusing than useful: I doubt there is
any rewording of "Drop elevated privileges" that would be widely
understandable. I think this should just be deleted, or replaced with a
"Remember my password for 5 minutes" checkbox in the Authenticate
dialog. <http://launchpad.net/bugs/550502>

And the File Operations menu is just a workaround for not having a real
progress window, i.e. a window that is minimizable but not closable.
<http://launchpad.net/bugs/534477>

>> 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.
> 
> Aren't the most common usage of notifications the situations where
> relevant windows are *not* currently in sight, or when there is no
> such thing as "relevant windows" at all?

Only if you define "notifications" as "things that aren't already being
shown in a relevant window". :-)

- -- 
mpt
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