[ge-talk] [haiku-development] Re: Notification Server?

[Niels Reedijk]

Hi Axel (and others),

I see the points you are trying to make. In my initial mail I was
against popup notifications per definition. I have no tried to
rephrase this to become a bit milder.

2007/5/24, Axel Dörfler <axeld at pinc-software.de>:
> "Niels Reedijk" <niels.reedijk at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The second point is that I find it a bad idea to write a notification
> > mechanism now, because I consider it a solution looking for a
> > problem.
>
> I slightly disagree here. The problem already exists, as there is not
> only InfoPopper, but also applications that have home-brewn popups.
> One reason to have this functionality around is not to encourage apps
> to use it, but to have it under full control when they do. By arguing
> against an API like this, you actually create the problem you would
> like to avoid.

The problem I want to avoid is the problem that we create a
communication system which is probably suboptimal for most
communications. Now I never ruled out popups as a solution to certain
communication puzzles (though the only valid one I can think of right
now is instant messaging), I do want to emphasise that the road people
are trying to take in crafting the popup notifier is wrong.

When as a user I want to be notified, or interrupted, by things, I
want to be able to explicitly ask programs to do that to me. Now
imagine we end up having an advanced notifier system, complete with
severities, priorities and the most ingenious customizable but easy to
use filter dialog, we are taking the responsibility of communication
away from the program developers. We are basically saying: use this
system to communicate with your user. My fear is that this will be
taken up as a carte blanche by any developers to stop doing their
proper job and think about the communications paths, and rather
bombard the user with messages because he can filter them out anyway
(which would mean losing important ones).

Now at the moment I´m open to the idea that popups aren´t the worst
thing that can happen to people. I mean, personally, I would hate
them, toss them out, burn them, etc. But I can see that popups will be
part of some communication solutions. That´s why, with pain in my
heard ;-), have to comply with Stephan´s first reply to my original
message with the opener that "it will be done anyways". The sentiments
on this list reflect that. But please keep it sane people. Popups
should be a solution of comunication for users that want to be
notified of events, and explicitly request for that notification. Like
starting your IM client, or asking your mail application to show a
notification whenever an email comes around.

What does that mean for the end result? Well, it would mean that there
will be a simple wrapper that sends BMessages to some entity that
displays popups in a uniform way. It does not mean that we should have
to implement the severities/filtering dialog.

Think of it this way. The application wants to send you messages. When
you don´t want to receive any of their spam, you tell that to the
application. Now what a severity/priority based system would do, is
that instead of the sender of the messages, we are telling the
messenger what not to deliver. Could we in this case say that we are
communicating? No. Ignoring things is not intuitive communication.

And you know what they say: don´t kill the messenger!

Niels