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Notification Suckage
Dec. 13th, 2009 11:53 amKDE has recently (as of 4.3) grown a notification system so that all system alerts can go through a centralized message display system rather than having each program pop up its own notices. This reduces program bloat and adds the potential for fine-grained control over how and when important system messages appear and are handled.
I have desperately wanted such a feature for years and I think its one major area where Linux (and the Mac, of course, which had it first) now wins over Windows in usability. That said, the current implementation sucks badly.
First of all, the notifier is woven into the system tray, rather than being its own widget. This means that the controls for the notifier are mixed in with the system tray controls. Worse, it means that the notices themselves appear as part of the KDE panel. My panel is at the top of the screen, and autohides. Having notices dangling from it prevents the auto-hiding and makes clicking on other windows problematic. The most that the system tray should do is tell you how many notices are unread, and give you a button to click on to summon them. The notifier itself should be its own widget that you can put where you want.
That's a minor complaint though, and will probably soon be fixed. A more major complaint is that the notices themselves have no priorities, and tend to auto-delete themselves. If I've gone for coffee, I don't want a message about a partition being full to have appeared and self-destructed before I get back. By the same token I don't want 1000 identical 'Can't contact the Internet' messages when my connection goes down for 5 minutes.
Ideally, the notification system should work like a cross between a mail system and the system log, and in a perfect world would have connections to both of these. I should be able to set filters and automatic dispositions for expected sorts of messages, and be able to modify the priorities of messages which appear innocuous but which could be the first sign of a major problem. Notification messages should be able to trigger the creation of 'ToDo' items or could send a text message to my cell phone.
My only hope is that all of these things are coming down the pipe, and that the KDE folk are just working on the underlaying infrastructure for it now.
I have desperately wanted such a feature for years and I think its one major area where Linux (and the Mac, of course, which had it first) now wins over Windows in usability. That said, the current implementation sucks badly.
First of all, the notifier is woven into the system tray, rather than being its own widget. This means that the controls for the notifier are mixed in with the system tray controls. Worse, it means that the notices themselves appear as part of the KDE panel. My panel is at the top of the screen, and autohides. Having notices dangling from it prevents the auto-hiding and makes clicking on other windows problematic. The most that the system tray should do is tell you how many notices are unread, and give you a button to click on to summon them. The notifier itself should be its own widget that you can put where you want.
That's a minor complaint though, and will probably soon be fixed. A more major complaint is that the notices themselves have no priorities, and tend to auto-delete themselves. If I've gone for coffee, I don't want a message about a partition being full to have appeared and self-destructed before I get back. By the same token I don't want 1000 identical 'Can't contact the Internet' messages when my connection goes down for 5 minutes.
Ideally, the notification system should work like a cross between a mail system and the system log, and in a perfect world would have connections to both of these. I should be able to set filters and automatic dispositions for expected sorts of messages, and be able to modify the priorities of messages which appear innocuous but which could be the first sign of a major problem. Notification messages should be able to trigger the creation of 'ToDo' items or could send a text message to my cell phone.
My only hope is that all of these things are coming down the pipe, and that the KDE folk are just working on the underlaying infrastructure for it now.
