Notification System

[Mirco Müller]

Greetings Esben!

Am Dienstag, den 01.12.2009, 23:15 +0100 schrieb Esben Stien:

> ...
> I've also installed notify-osd, which actually manages to display a
> notification over my running mplayer, but it disappears again. It
> doesn't have any way to remain in place; probably because it doesn't
> have any way to close it, since it doesn't support actions.

	The reason for this is to avoid the user being spammed by notifications
coming from "misbehaving" applications.

	Being action-less helps making notifications ephemeral and not getting
in the way of the user. The user will not be urged to click something,
thus be briefly drawn away from his/her current workflow.

> ...
> Running it with a timeout of 0 displays a dialog box, which also does
> not appear on top of my fullscreen mplayer.

	notify-osd deliberately ignores non-zero timeouts, because it is meant
to be in control how long something is on-screen. Zero timeouts (meaning
"stay on-screen forever") are an indication, that the sending
application wants to tell the user something very important. For such
messages notification should not be misused.

	This fallback-dialog is meant to cause a bug-report and/or show us
which application is misusing the notification-system. Then we can
engage with the application's upstream and suggest redesign of that
particular notification-use and/or work out a patch.

	That's some of the rationale behind the design-principles, which drive
notify-osd.

	What kind of notification (information) do you want to present anyway?
Since you want it to stay on screen forever (until you notice it) there
might be a better way to do so.

Best regards ...

Mirco