GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 652752
don't pop up under the pointer
Last modified: 2016-12-08 10:19:17 UTC
One of the bigger problems with the tray is that it often pops up under the pointer. This is pretty frustrating for the user. I think we need some kind of pointer avoidance. When the user is actively interacting with the system in the region of the expanded message tray we should avoid showing the tray. We would still have to indicate that there are messages ready to show and allow the user to get to them. One possibility is to make the bottom edge of the screen indicate a message is ready. Something like a tiny bit of the banner peeking out or the edge "glowing". Using something like a glow might work well to indicate there are even more new messages while viewing a message in banner mode. Moving the mouse away from the bottom of the screen could "draw" the message out in direct proportion to the distance from the edge of the screen. When the pointer is moved completely out of the message tray region the banner would be displayed in total. Additionally, you could move the pointer to the edge of the screen and hold it there for a moment. This would "bump" or "pop" out the message under the pointer. For this to work well we'd need allow the message tray to be popped out at the bottom edge any time. This used to be the standard behavior before we moved to the hotcorner. I think moving to the hotcorner was a mistake. It was an attempt to solve the pointer avoidance problem but perhaps not the best one. I think just requiring a "hold" on the edge of the screen is enough. This would make it much more consistent - you get to the banners in the middle and you can get the tray anytime from the middle. An open question is how you hold the edge in vertical multi-monitor scenarios but really we don't encourage that anyway. And the tray already doesn't work that well there.
(In reply to comment #0) > An open question is how you hold the edge in vertical multi-monitor scenarios > but really we don't encourage that anyway. And the tray already doesn't work > that well there. Also see Dan's patches in bug 636963 ...
(In reply to comment #0) > For this to work well we'd need allow the message tray to be popped out at the > bottom edge any time. This used to be the standard behavior before we moved to > the hotcorner. I think moving to the hotcorner was a mistake. It was an attempt > to solve the pointer avoidance problem but perhaps not the best one. No, it was done because people were constantly accidentally triggering the message tray any time they tried to interact with something at the bottom of a maximized window.
That's the same thing.
*** Bug 645872 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 653899 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 647894 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 649840 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 661331 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14z4wdgNF9g#t=0m28s for guidance.
Is it possible to extend this bug to talk about having the notification not pop up and cover a text area while the user is inputting/typing something in it? The most pathological case is typing in a full-screen terminal, or an xchat window.
Possible missing piece of information about the mouse interaction: to actually hover over the banner to expand it, one has to fully allow it to expand by going away from it + $extra-border and then go back down. $extra-border probably around 6px mark.
A big "yes please" to Comment 10 above. The pop-up message area was so bad at covering text input at the bottom of the screen, I finally turned off all notifications and installed pidgin. The pop-up area would actually cover my IM input area to tell me there was a new message, then give me a 2nd input area to respond. The whole telepathy setup is garbage and we need a way to turn it off. I think the best solution is the wildly popular Comment 42 in the "we can easily miss incoming messages" bug: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=641723#c42 The lower message area needs to go away. Or at least give us the option to disable notifications without setting our IM status to "Busy" with no option to change it.
*** Bug 729043 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I think this issue was mainly an issue when notifications were at the bottom of the screen - I haven't noticed it with the new design and there hasn't been any activity here in a while.