Re: Notifications

On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 5:06 AM, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi> wrote:

> FWIW, Microsoft explicitly says notifications must be ignorable and don't
> persist. "Notifications aren't modal and don't require user interaction, so
> users can freely ignore them." "In Windows Vista® and later, notifications
> are displayed for a fixed duration of 9 seconds."
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511497.aspx


There are several references to Windows notifications, and how they work as
a guideline (ignorable, 9 seconds, etc.) It is worth noting that these have
been around for some time and applications (im clients, some rss readers,
etc.) that care about notification *don't* use them.


> So a very simple use case: email web app wants to alert "you have new
> mail" outside the frame, and allow the user to click on that alert and be
> taken to the inbox page.  This does not work on NotifyOSD, because they
> explicitly don't support that part of the D-bus notifications spec.
>  However, Growl would support this.
>
> If acknowledgement support is super-important to Web apps, surely it should
> be to native apps, too.
>

The use case seems to be about allowing the user to take quick action on a
notification. The growl, many mobile notifications (and
the aforementioned windows notification system) allow the user to click
notifications and be taken to a more in depth view of the information. It
sounds like NotifyOSD is an outlier in this aspect.


>
> On Feb 11, 2010, at 00:10, Drew Wilson wrote:
> > it seems like the utility of being able to put markup such as bold text,
> or graphics, or links in a notification should be self-evident,
>
> It's not self-evident. If it were, surely native apps would be bypassing
> NotifyOSD and Growl to get more bolded and linkified notifications.
>

>From reading the spec, it looks like Notify OSD supports two kinds of markup
already, so it allows for bold, italic, links, underlines, images, and fonts
(http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/0.9/x161.html,
http://library.gnome.org/devel/pango/unstable/PangoMarkupFormat.html).

So it makes headway in allowing for applications a richer display, but of
course, this is arbitrarily limited and would cut out several scenarios that
Drew and John have already mentioned.

Lastly, it sounds like the any UA implementing the api being proposed could
use these mechanisms (NotifyOSD, etc.) and just not provide as rich of an
experience (as one would get from an html version).

dave