Hi Mark! Thanks for response and the information. One thing I think is that the actual presentation part should avoid looking too sure of itself. With the classic notification-daemon, there were often notifications pointing at the wrong places on screen because their related applets had moved. Not great for usability, as a user would expect that indication to be correct. I think it could be a bit smoother to have this feel more like a gentle nudge in the right direction; it directs the user's eyes towards where the attached coordinate is If he is reading the notification.
Think of how people indicate things in the real world. One can either point, which is what the old system did, or he can quietly indicate with a nod of the head, for example. Either way, it often feels way easier for everyone to do it with physical movements than with words (or at least a mixture of the two). Especially so when it's up in the air whether someone will read those words in time ;) Tomorrow I'll hopefully have some time to try different kinds of visual information, and I'll post screencasts probably on a forum thread and ubuntu-devel-discuss. Two things spring to mind right now: * Scaling is bad. It's visually quite distracting, and suggests that pointiness thing I want to avoid. Just glide + the existing fade effect could be applied. I was thinking there could be a sort of radial gradient as the notification fades out, so one end (the pointing end) would appear more prominent, giving us the same pointiness as the scale effect without really adding more movement. It could help so the gliding makes a bit more sense without adding more distraction (except for a strong desire to gaze at the awesome effect). A possibly big issue then is that in some cases the notification bubble ends up racing really quickly across the entire desktop, which could be /slightly/ helped by a parabolic curve for movement speed, but only slightly. * Just an arrow. Not sure if this is what you're describing, but perhaps no extra animation needs to be done; there could just be a little black arrow pointing out from the notification towards the attached coordinates, varying in style baed on the distance that area is from the bubble. The notification itself would not move. Seems like that would be an okay last resort, if not the optimal solution. In that case I don't think the loss of roundness would be too bad, and the effect would be super subtle. -- support X and Y hints for notifications https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/333517 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Notify OSD Developers, which is subscribed to Notify OSD. Status in Canonical's Notification Display Agent: New Bug description: Many applications use the X and Y hints to explicitly place their notifications. This is typically accessed in libnotify via notify_notification_attach_to_widget. Very popular to link a notification to a status bar applet. In fact, this functionality is even showcased in the concept video! <http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/253> It would be sensible to support this hint in notify-osd. To go with the "relaxed" design philosophy, the notification itself should not be placed according to the hint, but when it fades out (and perhaps when it fades in) it should indicate the widget it is attached to. This way the user will know, if he wishes to act on the notification, exactly which button to press. I suspect that this would work better than the existing "place the notification at the hinted location no matter what" behaviour of the original notification-daemon, since here developers can set location hints knowing that they aren't being obtrusive. Thus, no need for more buttons; just point the user to where they already exist. So, err, please support this hint! _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~dx-team Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~dx-team More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
