GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 325762
Alarm notification icon is always visible
Last modified: 2013-09-10 14:04:09 UTC
The alarm notification icon is always in the notification area, which is wrong. This means that it looks like I'm always about to miss an appointment, an infact I spent 20 minutes checking my calendar to find the mystery appointment this morning when I first upgraded. Please only show the notification icon when there is an event to notify about, and move the alert preferences into Evolution itself.
I agree that it is not a welcome change to all users ... Please consider why the following changes are made that lead to the current scenario 1) Previously there is no indication that alarm notification process was running though it is an *independent* process by itself. Evolution users could just use Evo Alarm if they wanted to without even starting evolution. But there is no indication to be able to do this. ---- To overcome this handicap, a panel icon was decided upon with seperate configuration options. (A .desktop file yet to be added so that an evolution installation so that EvoAlarm shows up along with Evolution in Application menu) 2) Many of the UI processes that may need interaction with user have an indication that they are running ... in the panel through an icon.. example : gaim, KAlarm (of KOrganizer) It makes sense to do the same for evolution alarm notification. ---- To avoid confusion as to what that icon is doing there ... a tool tip can be added like all other UI things with message such as "Evolution's Alarm Notifier is running." 3) A change in preferences of alarms has nothing to do with evolution preferences and shud be easily doable within 2 clicks..
adding ui keyword.
1) I'd love to see Evolution install the alarm notification program into the user's session so that it was running all of the time, not just after Evolution starts. Obviously this needs a preference so that if the user decides not to run the notification process for whatever reasons (never uses the alarms for instance) then it could remove itself from the session. 2) The notification area is for notification, persistant icons are a bad idea in my opinon. Gaim is simply copying what the various IM programs do in Windows. KAlarm is a KDE application and thus is irrelevant here. Compare the Evo alarm notification process with the Ubuntu Upgrade notifier or gnome-cups-icon, which start on login and only display an icon when there is something to notify the user about. If both of these processes displayed an icon all of the time, my notifcation area would currently have 6 icons in, only one of which is actually telling me something (I need to upgrade some packages). 3) The change has everything to do with Evolution as the alarms were created by Evolution.
Re comment #1, para 1: The fact that evolution-alarm-notify is a separate process is an implementation detail. Appointments are a desktop-level UI feature, which can be edited using the evolution application, but I'd still expect to see alarms regardless of whether evolution is running or not. Re comment #1, para 2: totally agree with comment #3 para 2 here: the notification area is for notification, not to inform the user which POSIX processes are running. If the user cares about the latter, they can run ps or gnome-system-monitor. Having every application register itself in the notification area is a misfeature; we don't want to copy this abomination from badly-designed Windows programs. Re comment #2 para 3 and comment #3 para 3: I think configuration for this should appear in both evolution and in the panel clock (the panel clock is the place to see your appointments when evolution is not running)
Dave makes a very good point, if we make the Clock applets Evolution integration handle alarms as well, then everything is sorted: there doesn't need to be an icon to show that the process is running as the process is always running.
*** Bug 326405 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Gnome 2.14 blocker.
*** Bug 324151 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
The icon appears to have a right-click menu with a "quit" item on it that actually causes the alarm notification daemon to _exit_. Does this mean that you get no alarms at all anymore? I doubt any user would actually want this.
Also, this icon is using a lot of space in the panel, unnecessarily. On e.g. a small laptop screen this space is crucial. Really, the notification area is for notifications, not constantly showing icons.
Thanks for the inputs on this. The issue is fixed in HEAD. Now the icon will appear only when there is a alarm pending. The alarm preferences is now a tab in calendar preferences.
Thanks for being responsive to our concerns. You're much more agreeable to work with than, uh, certain other former Evolution maintainers ;)