GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 384509
allow users to leave notes when screen is locked
Last modified: 2008-10-23 04:25:29 UTC
I don't know if this is a good idea or not and I'm not planning on working on it right away, but I thought I'd open a placeholder bug and to get some feedback. So one thing I often do at work is run from my cube to some other coworkers cube and inevitably find that they're out on a smoke break or in the kitchen eating a snack or whatever. Rather than hunting them down I usually just leave a note on their whiteboard telling them what I wanted to talk to them about or telling them to come find me. The problem with this approach is sometimes they have lost all their markers or have some complicated design already up there that I don't want to muck with. It might be interesting if I could leave a quick note on their computer while their screen is locked that they wouldn't see until they unlocked the screen. This has the added benefit of being more private than whiteboard note. I don't know, just an idea... I'm not sure if it's a good one.
Or perhaps, we can provide a way for them to leave a note saying where they are and when they'll be back when they lock the screen.
Yea, that might work, too. There are a couple of disadvantages to doing it that way though. 1) not users lock their screens explicitly. A lot of people just walk away and wait for the inactivity timer 2) it forces the users that are leaving to do extra work every time they leave, but most of the time when they leave no one will be looking for them.
an advantage of that approach though is that IM clients could use that as their away messages.
Why this bug is still unconfirmed ? I think it's realy good RFE
agreed, a really nice idea
Created attachment 82771 [details] [review] prototype implementation
Created attachment 83147 [details] [review] slightly better
For the record, this is one AMAZING new feature we're gonna rule with. Rock On Ray and Matthias!
Created attachment 83148 [details] [review] updated Sync with head, fix the label id, don't use ok/cancel, remove ellipsis for compactness, etc 2.19 material obviously.
Thats better. Can I suggest that we strip the ellipsis from "Switch User", too ?
Created attachment 83193 [details] [review] unfinished patch for away messages Here is an unfinished patch for the other part of Rays proposal, allowing the user to leave an "away message" on the lock dialog. Sorry that the glade file part of the patch has some unrelated changed, only the added away-message-label is relevant. The patch is incomplete insofar that it does not add a way to set the away message, since I was a bit unsure how to best do that. Putting that mesasge in gconf would feel a bit wrong, since it is meant for a single locking cycle only, typically. One option I had considered was to add an option to gnome-screensaver-command to set the message. That would of course require an addition to the dbus interface. Thoughts ?
I have now completed the away-message patch all the way to a GConf setting. And I have written a trivial little dialog to set it before locking the screen.
Created attachment 84935 [details] [review] away-message.patch
Created attachment 84936 [details] away.glade
Created attachment 84937 [details] away.c
Sweet. Would you mind putting the away stuff into bug #384534?
Committed to trunk. Thanks.
Thanks. It has meanwhile occurred to me that we may want to add a way to turn this off, other than changing lock dialog themes.
Would someone please add this stuff to http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointNineteen/ReleaseNotes
Sorry, but how do you actually write a note on a locked computer? I see the same old unlock dialog as before.
(Reopening) Is this really something we want in a notification bubble? I'd like to have a regular window with the away messages on my screen. Especially when using a relatively small screen (say 800x600 or even 1024x768) and multiple (perhaps longer) messages, it is hard to read what messages people left you. On the other hand, a dialog with a text area will be much more usable. And as an added bonus, you can actually select and copy/paste the text instead (e.g. email addresses) instead of discarding the message bubble on mouse click. Oh, and it was decided that libnotify is not a hard dependency for Gnome iirc. Does that have any implications for this feature?
I'd like to know how to use this feature too. I'm running gnome 2.19.90 and I can't find it.
as mentioned in comment 21, the feature depends on libnotify. Jeff, David, do you have libnotify installed?
I do have it.
You also need notification-daemon.
It is also installed already :)
are you using a themed lock dialog, or the stock lock dialog?
have not themed it that I know of, it is the one provided in ubuntu 7.10 without me doing modifications or setting changes
I can't find anything about this in the Screensaver preferences in Ubuntu Gutsy. Is it possible that they are building it incorrectly? Could someone please take a screenshot (with the simple theme) to show what the preferences for this look like when this feature is enabled?
> screenshot (with the simple theme) Sorry, I mean the default clearlooks theme.
I'm retitling this to "Allow disabling of leaving notes when screen is locked" because some of you seem to want that addition. Otherwise, I don't know why this bug is still open. I've also added http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=471845 (gnome-screensaver notes notification don't say what they are)
The ubuntu package was lacking a Build-Depends, I've uploaded a fixed version now
not sure if the bug should be closed, reopening for now
I'm going to close this. We should open a new bug for the ability to disable this feature.