Re: Notification types

On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 2:45 PM, Simon Dittlmann <
simon.dittlmann@googlemail.com> wrote:

> > Has the concept of notification types/priorities been discussed? It
> > seems to be a common feature in existing notification APIs to have
> > either a priority system or a category system or both. This has a number
> > of benefits for the user; for example they can set a filter on the
> > notification priority at some level on a system-wide basis or the
> > display can format the priority as appropriate for the notification type.
>
> I agree with you. Thereby you can differentiate between notifications from applications (you've got email) and from devices (your printer is out of paper). Furthermore with a priority system it would be possible that a fire detector notification is more important than an email notification.
>
>
> > The obvious way to expose this sort of thing in the API would be a set
> > of named constants for different types and an extra, optional, argument
> > to the notification constructor (or factory function) for the type constant.
>
> IMHO a factory function is a good idea.
>

If priority is part of the notification construction API, we would be
relying on each application to correctly declare its own priority.  It is
desirable that a "something is on fire" notification would get priority to
"new email", and maybe I'm being cynical, but won't all applications
eventually set the priority to maximum to avoid being filtered out?

A system which gives users control over the priorities of various
notification sources seems better -- perhaps it could be incorporated into
the permissions interface?

 -John