Desktop Notifications Spec 0.3

[Geoff Youngs]

On Thu, 2004-09-23 at 09:16 -0700, Christian Hammond wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 23, 2004 at 04:28:03PM +0100, Geoff Youngs wrote:

[snip]

> > Screen origin:
> > Could you consider specifying that the "screen"/"x"/"y" hints can be
> > used to optionally highlight the origin of the notification?  If, for
> > example, there is a desktop applet for each attached drive, it would be
> > nice for a "Low disk space" warning to indicate by its positioning which
> > drive it refers to.  Although it probably has some potential for abuse,
> > for some events, relating them spatially to the iconic representation of
> > their origin could be useful.

> Hmm, I think this is possible, although maybe this is a better reason
> for including a window ID or something as a hint?

Yes - quite possibly.  I was thinking of it as a hint in the first
place, but one specified explicitly in the spec so that
GNOME/KDE/whatever notification servers all do it the same way, rather
than have it implemented differently each time.

> > Desktop event logs:
> > The potential exists for the notification server to be used as a log of
> > "significant" desktop events - could there be an obligatory "nodisplay"
> > hint which indicates that the server may log, but may not display the
> > notification?

> It seems to me that we have /var/log/* files for things like that.
> These are designed to be notifications, not a logging service. I can't
> see a case for this where a log file wouldn't just be a better
> solution in general?

In general, probably yes.  I was thinking of cases where the application
needs to popup a dialog in response to the event anyway, in which case
there's no point in the notification server popping up a second dialog,
but it might still seem more coherent for a notification log to list it
as having happened.

For example, if an IM is configured to automatically accept files sent
by Jim, but to ask for confirmation when Bob tries to send one, it would
be natural to simply notify the user that they've been sent a file by
Jim.  It would be nice for the sake of consistancy to log the file
transfer by Bob, but not so nice to report the transfer in two separate
windows simultaneously.

-- 
Geoff Youngs <g at intersect-uk.co.uk>