Dear Thomas and Christoph, First of all, thanks for showing so much interest in Saros in general and in this topic in particular.
On one hand I'm quite happy with some of your points, e.g. your thoughts about the big picture: not only adding one new type of notification, but asking for more occasions and optionally reworking all notifications at once. Unfortunately, on the other hand I see a couple of impediments down the way: * We've been working on disentangling our license model since May 2012 -- but (obviously) not at full power, which is not due to a lack of motivation, but of resources. Therefore I'm a bit nervous when thinking about introducing new dependencies. (Although replacing the BalloonWindows implementation with the Mylyn solution would only replace one EPL-licensed piece of code with another.) * The chat is currently "under construction". So if you're going to change something related to the chat, you'll have to take care of the ongoing process. (See [1] as an entry point for more detailed information, the IDs mentioned there refer to our review system Gerrit [4]; synopsis: we have 13 (!) chat-related patches in our "queue" and you would have to build your changes on top of the last one, and *not* the current state of the chat.) That situation is really unsatisfying, I'm working on that. * These 13 chat-related patches introduce session-independent 1-to-1-chats, each of which is represented by a separate tab [2]. Therefore the whole idea of introducing some kind of message notification is be rethought. The user won't need the information "there is a new message in your one and only chat window"; rather something like "there are unread messages in these particular tabs". To make a long story short: If you want to satisfy this feature request, you'll need to think about the actual user needs that arise from the new 1-to-1-chats. Some ideas: * Highlight the corresponding tab(s) by color, font weight, blinking, outstanding icon ... surprise us! * Display the number of unread message (like Skype (?)) Please make sure that you put your ideas up for discussion *before* actually submit your patch(es) -- we take usability seriously [3]. Best Regards, Franz Links: [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.ide.eclipse.saros.devel/333 [2] https://www.dropbox.com/s/37xzxt8e8a0b5ad/saros-new-chat.png [3] http://www.saros-project.org/UsabilityEngineering [4] http://saros-build.imp.fu-berlin.de/gerrit -----Original Message----- From: SourceForge.net [mailto:nore...@sourceforge.net] Sent: Friday, November 09, 2012 1:17 PM To: SourceForge.net Subject: [Dpp-robot] [ dpp-Feature Requests-3392259 ] No notification about new Chat entries Feature Requests item #3392259, was opened at 2011-08-16 01:11 Message generated for change (Comment added) made by You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=843362&aid=3392259&group_id=167540 Please note that this message will contain a full copy of the comment thread, including the initial issue submission, for this request, not just the latest update. Category: None Group: None Status: Open Priority: 3 Private: No Submitted By: erosen (erosen) Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody) Summary: No notification about new Chat entries Initial Comment: Notification about new Chat entries would be nice. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: cviebig () Date: 2012-11-09 04:16 Message: Thomas Benndorf and me, Christoph Viebig, would like to implement this feature request in the context of an university course. We would like to take up the idea to add visual notifications to inform the user about new events in Saros and follow the often used approach to show a desktop notification popup. An implementation already used in Saros is the class BalloonWindow in com.novocode.naf.swt.custom (ext-src) which displays a Windows XP style balloon notification, as seen in [1]. The Class is licensed under EPL. The Eclipse project tried to sum up the current state of such UI Notifications in Eclipse subprojects [2]. It found out that there are currently no standard API's in the major operating systems (Windows, Linux, Mac) to show such notifications although the use of such functionality would be favorable. Furthermore they observed that there are two projects that implement desktop notification popups theirselves. On the one hand (1) Mylyn and on the other (2) Jazz [4,5]. While we have to admit that the licensing of the Jazz library is at the moment unclear to us, Mylyn is licensed under EPL. As far as we can see in [2] it seems that the Mylyn notification popups are commonly used to display more than one event at the same time, allowing the user to quickly catch a larger part of chat messages to decide wether an immediate response is needed. In contrast Jazz notification popups seem to use a paged approach displaying only one event at a time. To sum everything up: There are three options to implement desktop notification popups. The option already used in one part of Saros displays Windows XP style balloons. Is it desirable to replace it by an alternative implementation which might be more flexible and comes with a more platform independent design? Just to get a feeling for such popups we implemented a small demo application with Mylyn notifications. We noticed that we need to provide an extra thread to display and dispose the notification popups. As far as we could see Saros code is frequently using de.fu_berlin.inf.dpp.util.Utils.run*Async() for such jobs. As dependency org.eclipse.mylyn.commons.ui_3.8.2.v20120916-1200.jar (from http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/downloads/) is needed which is licensed under the EPL 1.0. As far as we could see the IMUCSessionListener::messageReceived() defined in ChatroomsComposite Class (in de.fu_berlin.inf.dpp.ui.widgets.session) would be the place to trigger new visual notifications for incoming chat messages. Adding more notifications for updates in the Whiteboard seem to be useful to us as well. Do you see further uses for notification popups? We hope we did not miss anything and would be glad if you share your opionion about our thoughts with us. Thank you very much in advance :) [1] http://www.novocode.com/swt/ [2] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Platform_UI/Notifications [3] http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/ [4] http://www.jazz.net/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: erosen (erosen) Date: 2011-08-18 01:38 Message: I mean some kind of visual notification (not necessarily a new bubble, but maybe three times blinking or so) for those (like me) who do not get sounds from Saros, because Skype is blocking the mike. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Karl Beecher (k_beecher) Date: 2011-08-17 05:39 Message: What kind of notifications do you mean? There's already optional sound. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. 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