On Sat, Nov 06, 2010 at 03:07:29AM -0300, Martin Abente wrote: > On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 1:44 AM, Martin Dengler > <mar...@martindengler.com>wrote: > > > On Fri, Nov 05, 2010 at 06:02:28PM -0300, Martin Abente wrote: > > > Hello amigos, > > > > > > Recently I encountered many situations where a system-wide > > > notification-messages system is required as a basis for many bug fixes or > > > enhancements. > > [...] > > > Currently, Sugar does not have a mechanism to communicate to users > > > different kind of information about sugar itself. > > > > What about the notification system? The Log activity? The Journal > > Full warning? The Frame? There are a lot of communication > > mechanisms, but they dn't seem to do what you wnat: > > > > > > * The notification system only shows an icon floating, and if you want to > show a message you have to implement a palette manually, not so DRY > considering all the use cases.
I'm not sure what you mean by "DRY". The reason - I guess - for only the icon is because text requires translation and literacy (a point you make later). I prefer text (obviously, since we developers work with text as much as possible) but this requires a change to the HIG. We should think hard about why, and justify it. > * Why the user should start an activity to know what is happening? I know, this is odd for developers/computer people. I personally don't like it (I really liked the "quake terminal"[1] approach), or having four activities to read e-books. But a) it's what the HIG[2] says, for some good reasons (it's not better to have text flashing by all the time -- have you seen how many exceptions are in shell.log!?); and b) it's not a new approach: OSX has the "Console" log viewer, Windows has the Event Viewer. > Even if they do, do you think all that pile of text is really > helpful? (for a developer, sure.. for a 7 years kid probably not, > and if you want him to understand you would have to translate the > log messages anyway). Wait, that's my argument you just stole :). If you're saying the error messages should be better, I don't think anyone would disagree. > * The journal full warning is actually a problem to be solved, #630. Wow, I can't believe it's taken 20 months to fix it. I guess it's not that critical :(. > * What about the frame?, currently it > does nothing about this issue. (except for the floating pulsing > icon) That's exactly what you wanted, but with icons instead of text: a list of the messages from Sugar, without starting an activity. > Again, why should we force users to start an activity to know what is > happening. To summarise: 1) Because the HIG tells us to, and nobody's proposing changing the HIG 2) Because Sugar UI should strive for simplicity, not tons of alerts that only a developer would understand 3) Because it's not clear what advantage over the existing notifications + Log activity you think will exist. > > > I invite everyone to share their ideas on how this feature could > > > work and look. Well, those were my ideas. When you have something more I'm sure we could have a more constructive discussion. > We need sugar to tell the users what is happening otherwise they will never > guess it, that is exactly problem in the first place. I can't imagine a kid > having to check the log activity every 10 minutes to see if the automatic > backup has started recently. I can't imagine any more than a few kids at each deployment (so, that's say 100 of 1.5 million laptops) ever wanting to see if the automatic backup has started recently. > Anyway, if someone does not like the messages and wants just wants to read > the log every N minutes they could be disable it :):):) In my experience, every time you show some information to the user that isn't actionable, they hate it. > > Saludos > > > Martin (tch) Abente > > > > Martin Martin 1. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Quake_Terminal 2. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Human_Interface_Guidelines#Simplicity
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