GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 104641
Rethink UI of balloon messages
Last modified: 2014-12-29 18:30:09 UTC
If I send a message to the notification area (using EggTrayIcon), the message never times out.
The balloon messages feature is basically not implemented. You shouldn't use it unless you're going to fix it. ;-) (I would encourage you to fix it, though.)
Created attachment 13935 [details] [review] intial patch against gnome-panel-2.1.90.1
One thing I just remembered, KDE didn't like the balloon part of the spec, so we should probably bring it up on xdg-list again or rename the atoms relating to that to the _GNOME namespace. Ross does this patch work with your app?
Sure does, excellent. :)
One note on the patch, current_balloon should not be a global variable; it should be stored on the EggTrayManager, just as a struct field instead of as object data would be fine. Also, shouldn't you be able to queue up multiple messages and handle that sanely somehow via the UI?
I believe that using tooltips for messages is a bad idea for this reason. My tool was going to send multiple messages, but if the all appear as tooltips then only the latest one will be visible, which is not good. Maybe MSN Messenger like scrolling windows would be better.
Have a look at how Windows XP works here. I think it shows each tip as you close the previous one, or something. A log-viewerish display might be interesting too I guess. It's probably worth stepping back here for a minute and doing a real UI design for the notification area - either that or basically just copying Windows XP's UI design. Ideally we could support a cross-platform API in GTK that worked on XP and GNOME, so that may affect how we want to design it.
The XP mechanism probably isn't *quite* as straightforward as showing multiple balloons sequentially, as it also has the notion of severity... so I'd hope (but I don't know) that a warning balloon would automatically override an information balloon.
Removing PATCH keyword as Havoc had issues with it
Re-assigning to gnome-panel-maint. Apologies for the spam.
*** Bug 113803 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment on attachment 13935 [details] [review] intial patch against gnome-panel-2.1.90.1 UI design decision needs to be made before moving forward.
> It's probably worth stepping back here for a minute and doing a > real UI design for the notification area - either that or basically > just copying Windows XP's UI design. This has been a long time since we've stepped back. Is there any news on UI design for this?
Windows XP does have a real problem here. Logging onto many computers (for example, with the Dell factory defaults) results in a long flood of closing balloons. Incredibly annoying. My gut feel is that balloons should only be used for transient / relatively unimportant information anyway, so it'd be better to have them pop up and automatically dismiss... but this has problems too. Not sure what to do here. A lot of it is dependent on the question of "how responsibly will balloons be used"?
I committed a (big) patch that make balloon messages work. Here's the current way it works now: + each tray icon can display one message at a time + when the user clicks on the message, or after the timeout of the message, the next message for this tray icon is displayed (yes, we buffer next messages) There's no notion of severity since the system tray spec doesn't allow this. Also, having a kind of log viewer (as proposed in comment #7) might help. The thing is, libnotify is getting a lot of love. We should either kill the messaging part of the notification area or kill libnotify (having both doesn't sound useful to me). But this is probably xdg matter. Keeping the bug open as a "Rethink UI of balloon messages" :-)
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