I’ve been inspired by the December GNOME mockups. A lot of them are quite nice, and in the area of notifications, it had some good ideas on sprucing up the look and feel. So I present to you, notification-daemon v0.3.4!
Along with the usual assortment of bug fixes, I’ve improved the style quite a bit. There’s now a countdown timer on notifications with actions, a close button, themed urgency-based stripes, and actual buttons.
| Before | After |
|---|---|
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Why on earth would a critical urgency notification dismiss itself in 10 seconds? Or conversely, why would a self-dismissing notification be critical? =)
Excellent questions 🙂 I’m going to use the excuse that everybody likes self-destructing messages, which are usually pretty critical and, well, have to self-destruct sometime.
Christian: those new alert dialogs look very sexy, if you don’t mind my saying so. :-]
Great stuff! I remember looking over the notification mockups, and then the spec and now it’s so cool to see this in action. I look forward to our pop-tart future 🙂
Some mockup years ago show countdown as emptying progress bar. You know, that grey/blue/red stripe on left side shortening, and shortening till timeout.
Peter: Not at all 🙂 They are sexy.
Ed: If you run Ubuntu Breezy, you already have support on your system 🙂 This is just a new release with pretty new styles.
Tomasz: Yeah. I considered that, but I felt that the pie countdown method was a lot cleaner and out of the way.
This is cool stuff. I’m wondering if it’s possible to send some notification from the commandline, using dbus-send maybe? I’m not all that familiar with dbus and it doesn’t seem all that straightforward to me, even with the use of Google.
Richard: libnotify contains a notify-send tool that allows for easily sending notifications on the comand line. I use it in many of my tests.
Argh! Please don’t transfer the “Low Disk Space” nightmare from Windows to Linux. It’s bad enough that this sucker pops up every few minutes on Windows and there is no way other than to edit the registry to turn this major annoyance off. *Please* tell me that Gnome handles this in a more intelligent way.
I’m still using Hoary Hedgehog, and refuse to upgrade until Dapper 🙂 Thanks for the work.
They’re really sexy, I really like more that blue thing earlier. December mockups are cool & I wanna see something like that in gnome’s future.
I like the new features, but I think the look could do with some work – Having the icon centered below the title makes it look lop-sided, as does having it half-in the coloured bit on the side. I think the more subtle colour of the old notifications looked nicer, as well as having the icon centered to both the title and the subtitle, and contained fully in the side. I also preferred the underline hyperlinks to the buttons, but I think that’s much more a taste issue 🙂 Otherwise, good work!
Regarding my previous comment, after seeing those same notifications in this mock-up: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gamehack/70003968/in/set-1506658/
They do look very nice 🙂
Great work – my thoughts
1. spruce up the icons a bit so they are larger, standard sizes, and at the proper resolution
2. tone down the red or nix it – anything important enough to be candy-apple red should be a dialog box, not a notification, and should wait for your intervention
3. kill the countdoom of doom – if they miss a notification they should check the log. If the logs are too scary, let’s fix that in 2.16. If we can’t afford to miss it, it should’nt dissapear
Thanks for all you do!
–Rob Caskey
Dennis: That was a unit test for actions. If people do implement it, it honestly doesn’t bug me. In fact, it would be helpful at times. There’s no reason why it couldn’t be made to be easily disabled.
Chris: I think they look nice. The icons used in the screenshots may not be the best, but they’re looking beautiful here in real-world usage. The nice thing is, if you like the old look, you could just backport the theme from 0.3.2, rename it, and stick it in your engines dir. However, it would have to be maintained. I may end up just bringing this back as a separate theme for 0.3.5.
Rob: 1) I didn’t make those icons. I don’t see what the notifications have to do with it. 2) That’s for developers using libnotify to take into consideration. That’s not my issue. 3) The countdown is fine. It provides a good indication as to how long a person has to answer a notification, and shows that it will time out otherwise. It’s only for notifications with actions. I’m leaving this feature in.
Looks awesome! Great job Christian!
Christian, very very good work! Are you planning to drop all this stuff into gnome CVS? I think it will speed up libnotify inclusion in gnome.
Thanks for the work.
I agree with what Rob Caskey said in his third point.
“3. kill the countdoom of doom”
I also feel there’s no need for the close button. The notification could be closed by clicking anywhere in the box, or not at all if that’s viewed as better. That way I think things would look cleaner.
The notify-send –help output shows:
-t, –expire-time=INT Specifies the timeout in seconds at which to expire the notification.
The code interprets this as the timeout in MILLIseconds… patch to fix this problem:
— notify-send.c.orig 2006-01-29 13:44:08.000000000 +0100
+++ notify-send.c 2006-03-07 10:47:21.000000000 +0100
@@ -131,7 +131,7 @@
notify = notify_notification_new(summary, body, icon_str, NULL);
notify_notification_set_category(notify, type);
notify_notification_set_urgency(notify, urgency);
– notify_notification_set_timeout(notify, expire_timeout);
+ notify_notification_set_timeout(notify, expire_timeout * 1000);
notify_notification_show(notify, NULL);
g_object_unref(G_OBJECT(notify));