Desktop Notifications Spec 0.3

[Mike Hearn]

> I can see one more use for having sound in the notification spec.
> 
> Stuff like 'new email', 'user foo enters chat' etc can be notifed with 
> sound  and/or visual notification. Having sound and a option to tell 
> that 'sound or notifikation is OK' in the spec make this costomisable in 
> a central place, good for accessability! IE, For sound notifikations I 
> want [ ] only sound if avalible, [ ] only popup, [ ] both.

I agree with Christian that this is best dealt with by filtering on 
type/urgency. If the notification server has required config UI I think 
we might be doing something wrong.

> Even without a notification history we gain that every app need not to 
> detect if they can play sound. I some time shut down the sound server to 
> use apps talking to sound device. If that automagicly made gaim 
> notifikations visual it would be cool!

I'd veto adding sound back in for such a reason. It's hacking around the 
broken state of Linux audio (not all operating systems refuse to do 
kernel-level mixing), and that problem is orthogonal to this.

Applications should be able to play sounds whenever they like, we have 
the technology to do this, now it's just a case of figuring out how we 
want to do it and where.

thanks -mike