Hi, It's been a while since we decided that I should write this email, but I nearly forgot about it. Sorry about that.
So, as we have discussed many times in the past, kde-telepathy is in need of a better notification system. What we have now, KNotify, is good in certain cases, but completely fails to serve some other cases. In more detail: What KNotify is good for: * Handling notifications regarding text messages. KNotify can handle any incoming or outgoing message and can do useful things with them, like play a sound, display a popup which will autohide after a while and some other less useful things. It can also distinguish between the various sorts of messages (like incoming on inactive window, incoming in group chat, incoming in group chat with highlight, incoming on active window, outgoing, etc...) and let the user configure them individually, without requiring much work from the developer (the developer can just tell knotify that something has happened with this context and knotify will find out if and how it will notify the user). In general, I think that the overall design of KNotify is very well suited to this use case (it was probably designed with this use case as a basis in mind). What KNotify can handle, but could do better: * Showing notifications about possible connection errors or other kinds of problems that MC reports. This is currently working, but it could be improved. I hate it when there is a connection error and I get a popup with an error message for every account I have configured. It would be much nicer to let the notification system know that these are just warning messages and configure it to make those less verbose. For example it could just display a warning icon in the tray that can be expanded to see the actual messages and autohide after a couple of minutes. What else do we need (or what KNotify is not good for): The most pressing need that we have is a way to show persistent notifications of the style "Foo is calling you: Accept/Hold/Reject". This is needed for approving calls, tube channels and subscription notifications. The requirements for this case are: * Be able to show a persistent popup or other form of visual notification (unlike KNotify where there is a Persistent flag, but the frontend may choose to ignore it). * Be able to have actions on this visual notification which must be available in any case (unlike KNotify where the frontend may choose to hide them). * Be able to optionally play a sound. * Be able to configure the sound to play constantly in loops while the notification is active (eg. for the call-ui ringing sound) (KNotify can't do that) * Be able to kill the notification from the application (eg. for a missed call, you don't want the notification to stay there forever) I'm also thinking that we need a way to display missed calls / missed tube invitations, probably as a persistent icon in the tray, but not sure if this belongs in the notification system or if it should just be a feature of the approver. Other cool ideas: The notification system could also profit from integration with telepathy. For example, if my current status is "busy", I probably don't want to be disturbed, so it would make sense for the notification system to make things less verbose and for example instead of a popup, show a flashing icon. That's all I think. Ideas / comments welcome. Regards, George _______________________________________________ KDE-Telepathy mailing list [email protected] https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-telepathy
