Gnome “Notification” ideas..
When Glynn blogged about the Zenity notification icon it got me thinking. I have been pondering about a notification stuff in general a bit too - but since I am a bit of a hurry right now, I’ll put this short. What if we had something like this:
tigert@archer:~> zenity --notification --window-icon="pantstrading.png" --title="Stock Alert" --content="stockalert.html" --delay=20
..and it would give us a notification popup that lasts for 20 seconds and displays (for example) a snippet of HTML you specify. I am not sure what is the best way to implement it - html comes to my mind first as a mechanism to add formatting easily to the content of the bubble, and we have a widget to display it. In any case if there are better ways, I dont care. What I would care is if I could get something like this from Zenity:
Wouldnt that rock? A flexible mechanism to do such alerts from a script would sure be a spark for imagination and new ideas.. Who wants to hack? I can provide art and layout ideas.. 
The green half-height bar would be a “timer” that works like a hourglass - it starts from the top and gradually drops down during the time the notification is visible - to show a clue to the user that it will disappear after a while. If you click on it it could stay there or turn to a normal window or something. Dunno yet. Comments welcome.
September 15th, 2004 at 17:17
as with any such intrusive notification (covers a big part of the screen), a checkbox to not trigger it anymore (at least in current session) would be good or it would be as anoying as a pop-up in while surfing the web.
no need for that of course for notifications that are 2 text-line high and located on the borders of the screen
that were my 2cts
September 15th, 2004 at 17:31
That would be dope! I can think of a billion uses for your idea.
September 15th, 2004 at 17:38
Take a look at the
Aero Notifications Guidelines. It’s only prudent to know what the “competition” is up to. There’s some really clever ideas in there in my opinion, such as the expansion on hover.
September 15th, 2004 at 17:42
Stephane: These are not intrusive: One main point is that they should never ever steal your keyboard focus. They appear on a corner or something, stay for a while (which the timer indicator shows) and then fade away. If you dont care about it, do nothing and it disappears anyway. So while it appears on the screen, it does nothing else. That’s the biggest problem with Gaim and other instant messaging tools, battery notifications, everything on Linux that tries to notify the user with a dialog. They get in your face too much. This is an attempt to solve the problem by making notifications that do it without distrupting your work. Also, there could be a mechanism to set yourself “busy” thus no notifications will appear at all. Also your DVD player could set a “fullscreen presentation” flag on the desktop so only stuff like “Dude, you run out of battery in 10 seconds!” get through
That’s the big idea. But got to take small steps to get there..
Sunspire: Yeah, I have seen the page, it was very good. Thanks for the tip anyway
September 15th, 2004 at 18:29
here, it’s simply ONE EXAMPLE of use of zenity with a notification.
it would be very good, and of course you can notify what _YOU_ want.
September 15th, 2004 at 19:01
I see the theory, but surely this kind of notification would come from a background daemon or something? Something that’s running all the time and wants to notify you if something changes (like the stock prices in your example). Would long-running daemons use zenity? Surely they’d call some function in the Gnome API to do a notification. I love the idea, personally (because I do write daemons in bash) but not everyone does.
Incidentally, being able to display arbitrary HTML in a small window like that is a big step towards a Gnome version of the Mac’s Dashboard (or, indeed, a more user-friendly gDesklets)…
September 15th, 2004 at 20:45
If this ends up using some sort of browser widget (gecko or some some such) to display the HTML, you also open the door to some very interesting miniapps that could popup and take user input through form fields and process it somehow.
October 20th, 2004 at 20:12
FWIW, I saw your idea (timing-out popup) and implemented it for an application of my own (a gmail notifier). You can see it in a screenshot here. Application itself is wmgmail. (it’s nothing much, but the idea really came from this entry).
November 5th, 2004 at 15:02
[…] Timeout = 4000; proxy.Notify(notification); Or if you wanna do it from the shell. Like Toumas suggested, the CLI client also take files as input where applicab […]