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Universal notification icon in system tray?Universal notification icon in system tray?Posted Mar 5, 2009 3:01 UTC (Thu) by fmyhr (subscriber, #14803)Parent article: Ubuntu debates usability changes
This may be hopelessly naive, as I've not followed any of the Ubuntu discussion except for the succinct summary in this article. BUT, how about having a single notification icon in the system tray. It would normally be grey, very easy to ignore. If an application had reason to notify the user, it would tell the daemon behind the systray icon. At the point the systray icon would turn red (or some user-configurable color / shape) to indicate that there is at least one notification awaiting user input. The user can choose to ignore it or not, depending on how they are using the system at the moment. If the user clicks on (or hovers above? -- perhaps again user-configurable) the notification icon, they get a menu listing the applications that are currently attempting to notify them. They select which app (maybe including "all") and all of that app's notifications are displayed. The user responds to each in turn, and they disappear from the universal notification icon menu. When there are none left, the systray icon turns back gray.
This seems to me to have the following benefits:
Maybe this completely misses the mark, I don't know. It just occurred to me as I was reading this article.
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Extension of kde adept-notifier Posted Mar 5, 2009 3:14 UTC (Thu) by fmyhr (subscriber, #14803) [Link]
I knew that "idea" seemed awfully familiar. It amounts to a ripoff/extension of adept-notifier or I suppose now update-notifier-kde. Just using it for *all* notifications, not only system updates.
Extension of kde adept-notifier Posted Mar 5, 2009 8:34 UTC (Thu) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
Just thinking back to another recent thread, having a single application there for notifications, which just remembers the messages and what to start when they are clicked on, might save a lot of valuable RAM. It seemed that some of the applications sitting there just to notify the user of something (sometimes even just waiting in case they need to notify and not actually displaying something) can take as much as 20Mb of RAM each, with update-notifier being a case in point.
Notification firewall Posted Mar 5, 2009 12:42 UTC (Thu) by fmyhr (subscriber, #14803) [Link]
Reading other comments below, where some people want to see confirmation that a USB device has been attached and recognized and others never want to see such a message, it occurs to me that having a universal notification daemon has another advantage:
3) It can act as a firewall between notifications and the user. In other words, the notification daemon could include user-configurable filters on notifying application, message, urgency level, etc. When a message like "USB device attached" comes along and a user never wants to see that again, they could right-click on that notification window and select an option "Don't show me such notification again" which would open a notification filter configuration window:
When the notification daemon receives another message that matches an existing filter, it puts that notification in a submenu of the systray icon marked "Hidden Notifications". It does not turn the icon itself red/active. But if the user clicks on the systray icon and selects "Hidden Notifications" they can see the notifications that have been hidden and respond to them or re-enable them if they so desire. After a configurable message lifetime, hidden messages would be automatically removed from the "Hidden Notifications" sub-menu.
To really gild the lily, the notification daemon could allow setting up multiple notification profiles, so that a user could build up different sets of notification filters for different use cases and easily switch among them.
Analogous to iptables firewall, with
Speaking of gilding lilies, the analogy could even be extended such that a notification daemon running in one session would *forward* matching notifications to a notification daemon running in another session / user / machine. Not sure that'd really be useful, though, and it gets complex in a hurry.
Notification firewall Posted Mar 5, 2009 23:21 UTC (Thu) by spitzak (guest, #4593) [Link]
I like the sound of this.
I think this can be extended to cover *all* of Linux logging. All those messages that get written to /var/logs can also go to this program. By default they are hidden messages.
I agree with others that one of the rules will have to be "make this other icon do something" so that you can still have the wireless indicator and others that people are used to.
Universal notification icon in system tray? Posted Mar 5, 2009 14:49 UTC (Thu) by sergey (guest, #31763) [Link]
How would this work with separate icons for battery and wireless link that are usually present in
a notification area? If they "delegate" their notification to yet another icon it'd probably be confusing.
Universal notification icon in system tray? Posted Mar 5, 2009 15:14 UTC (Thu) by fmyhr (subscriber, #14803) [Link]
Good point -- there are notifications the user wants to see at a glance, without having to click an icon and navigate its sub-menus.
One way this could be handled is to add another option that appears when you right-click on a notification: "add icon to systray". That would bring up a configuration window with:
Right-clicking on the new app/driver-specific systray notification icon would give you an option "move to universal notification icon" that would undo the steps above.
Probably most distros would ship with a standard configuration that would have separate icons for things like battery and wireless. And if the user didn't like those they could easily get them out of their systray and into the universal notification icon.
Universal notification icon in system tray? Posted Mar 7, 2009 10:48 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
Well, basically this is what plasma is doing already. All notifications go
through the central notification system (embedded in the systemtray but can be had separately as well, yay for modularity). There are no daemons or apps in the systemtray for battery usage or network management, even though you can have a plasmoid taking care of those. Even if you use these plasmoids (be it on a panel or desktop), notifications go through the notification plasmoid.
Universal notification icon in system tray? Posted Mar 6, 2009 16:29 UTC (Fri) by bfields (subscriber, #19510) [Link] Yes, it would be helpful to have the notifications combined with some kind of easy-to-find log; the main anxiety notifications give me as a user is "what if I ignore one and it turns out it was important?" It'd be reassuring to know I could always go back through the most recent ones....
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