unity-design team mailing list archive

[Conscious User <conscioususer@xxxxxxxxx>]

> > Which reminds me, shouldn't we stop pretending that synchronous and
> > asynchronous notifications are similar enough to deserve being
> > close? They are not, and the current approach causes more problems
> > than solves.
>
> What problems does it cause?

The most obvious one is the ugly gap when no synchronous notification
is being shown. But I personally think that making synchronous and
asynchronous informations have the same appearance and positioning
is a mistake by itself.

One is to notify and is supposed to call the user's attention. The
other one is to provide feedback and is something that the user
expects to appear. So much visual similarity for such different
things is confusing.

> What problems does it solve?

I am *supposing* that the idea is concentrating all notifications
in a single place of the screen, thus simplifying things for the
user. But this only makes sense if their purpose is similar
enough to deserve such concentration, and I don't think they are.

I do admit that the positioning is good when changing the volume
with the scrollwheel, but that's the only case I can think of.

> > If we must insist that their appearance must be the same, then the
> > synchronous bubbles should at least be moved to somewhere else,
> > like the lower corner (they can be there with no problems, since
> > their size is fixed)
>
> In December 2009 I drew up some possible alternative
> placements.<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotifyOSD#position>

Ops, sorry. I'm using the old "sync vs. async" terminology when I
should be using "confirmation vs. notification".

Anyway, is it my impression or the current placement is not even
considered a valid one according to the specification? Option 3
is by far my favorite. I remember Option 2 being tested and
receiving some bad feedback (of questionable value, though, as
I remember it was available for a very short period of time)

Are there any reasons for not testing option 3?

> > But I don't think even the appearance should be the same. In the
> > attached screenshot you can see what appears when I click the play
> > button when no player is open (I suppose it's a bug that notify-osd
> > is not handling this), and in my opinion is much better.
>
> Why do you think it's better?
>
> (I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you on any of these, but we need
> to be able to explain *why* something is worse or better.)

It's visually and positionally different enough to not be confused
with async notifications, and provides a very clear feedback. And
at least in my opinion the exposition time is short enough to
avoid intrusiveness (like volume gauges on TVs)

> > Also, notice how much more transparent it is. It seems
> > significatively less clickable than OSD bubbles.
>
> It can get away with being more transparent because it contains only
> large chunky graphics, never text.

Yes, but I'm not necessarily suggesting this for async notifications
too, just mentioning this as an advantage.