Ubuntu 9.04 has a new notification system (see http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/253 & http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/265 )

Under Ubuntu 9.04, Specto 0.3rc1 behave that way : 1°) changes in watches

• When specto notify a watch change, a persistant alert box pops up at the center of the screen.

• When specto notify several watches changes, several persistant alert box pops up at the center of the screen. With 2 alert boxes, the second hide the 1st since both of them are displayed at the center of the screen.

see the big picture attached (note that i've manually moved one of the box to the the top of the screen to let see the 2nd)

2°) error in watches

When specto notify an error in watches it looks like the bubble you can see on the little picture attached (sorry i forgot to take a real picture) and it's not persistant.

Concerning that new notification system, see also : https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotificationDesignGuidelines https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotificationDesignGuidelines/Comments https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotifyOSD and https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotifyOSD#specto https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotifyOSD/Comments

Concerning 1°)

The above screenshot shows 2 alert boxes : note that one of them is hidden by the other

Since these alert boxes don't provide any essential piece of information (i mean you can click on the Specto icon to see which watches have changed), maybe they should be bubbles without buttons ?

This is really interesting and i would love to have notifications like this... So if I understand correctly we only have to remove the buttons from the notification and it will become compatible?

i guess i can test a development version if you want

If you have the code from the main branch: /spectlib/balloons.py remove line 67 to 71 and let me know if it works!

ok, i'll try :-)

I tried it in my specto-dbus branch and it is working! :)

sorry i wasn't at home before now

glad to see it works

That is a good illustration of FLOSS ! Could you imagine Microsoft engineers answering : "please remove line 67 to 71 from windows kernel and let me know if it works"!

i've just tried and it also works fine for me !

BUT ; there is a lot of text in the bubble and it's quite small, not very readable in fact

also, maybe the bubble should be larger like these ones ( https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotificationDevelopmentGuidelines#Layout%20cases%20(with%20examples%20in%20C,%20Python%20and%20C#) ) ?

The Icon-Summary-Body seems the best one for specto. Maybe the balloon messages should also be more to the point. Like for gmail: the watch name in bold and the sender + subject listed in the body from the message.

the question is to know how Specto will handle different cases since some notification systems allow action (GNOME at present time) whereas some other don't (Ubuntu 9.04).

There is an interesting discussion there http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=557647#c9

Just adding a note that this goes in direct contradiction with issue #57.

I also saw (in https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotificationDevelopmentGuidelines) that with notify-osd, you can't use html markup (so, no bold/italics for us), and you can't specify the duration of the notifications. I don't want to rant (yet), but this sounds like a serious disservice to our users.

If this came from official, upstream GNOME, I would adopt the thing without question. But this is an ubuntu-specific hack, and I'm worried of hopping onto an already controversial bandwagon that has not (to me, personnally) proved its worth as a replacement for libnotify. I'll try reading up more on this before really commenting...

as woutclymans said, Icon-Summary-Body ( https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotificationDevelopmentGuidelines#Icon-Summary-Body ) has bold but maybe is it decided by Notify OSD and not by the developer ("If there is text, it consists of a title and/or a body. The title should be the standard application font size, of color #ffffff, and bold weight. The body should be 0.8 × the standard application font size, of color #eaeaea, standard weight, and should not contain any extra formatting." https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotifyOSD#Text%20layout )? However is it really a drawback since you can have the 1st line in bold (i.e. the name of the watch) ?

Apparently, applications should 1st check if the notification system allows actions and then display the good notification message (1)

Could we imagine Specto checking if the notification system allows actions, and if not, displaying something like Icon-Summary-Body ?

Concerning the duration, i suppose it can be set since there are recommandations about it : https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotifyOSD#Animations%20and%20durations Anyway Anyway durations recommanded seem good and quite similar to what is used within Specto ?

(1) The actions send a request message back to the notification client when invoked. This functionality may not be implemented by the notification server, conforming clients should check if it is available before using it (see the GetCapabilities message in [23]Protocol) http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/

I guess it makes sense, I'll have to see for myself how jaunty behaves. This may need a bunch of ifs in the code.

This may require a rearrangement of the contents of notification bubbles (ex: remove "specto" from the title, make the contents shorter, etc.), but then Specto would kind of lose its uniqueness; how would the user even know that a bubble was made by specto if there's no action, no bubble-link to the notification icon, and no mention of specto in the bubble? But some might argue that the user shouldn't care where the notification comes from...

why not something like :

"Name of the watch" has changed Specto reports that this watch has changed (by 8,2%)

or "Name of the watch" Specto reports that this watch has changed (by 8,2%)

any plan to make specto comply with new ubuntu notification system ?

In the grand scheme of things, I think I don't disagree with having code makes our notifications conform to it when needed; the current situation with intrusive dialogs is horrible, to say the least.

This will require code that - checks for allowed capabilities of the installed notification system - make our balloons conform to it (strip out every possible feature with a bunch of if/else, basically) - ignore (and visually hide) the duration widget in the preferences dialog

Now is also the time to agree on what should be shown as title and description of the balloons.

For the record, I still vaguely think (at this point in time) that the idea of notify-osd sucks/is a solution in search of a problem/is an important functionality regression (no text formatting; no positionning; no actions; no duration; etc.), but for the sake of integrating into Ubuntu's little game (and seeing how it will turn out in the end), I agree that this should be patched in specto, at least for the time being.

I personnally cannot look into this matter until summer (and even then, no guarantees), so if someone provides a patch that does all this, it would be quite helpful.

I will have a try at this today in my branch. However, it will be done unelegantly.

Easier done than said. It's in specto-jeff, please verify. I also pushed changes to the contents of the balloons. Translators need to update some strings.

concerning the new implementation, what about my comment 14 ?

Since the notifications are not attached to the tray icon anymore i think that Specto must figure somewhere in the bubble !

Not really. The notification icon is there for that, and in the end, if we follow notify-osd's logic, we only care about the document/content, not the app where it came from (otherwise they would have allowed attached balloons).

"otherwise they would have allowed attached balloons" i think there is no attached balloons because several baloons can be displayed simultaneously http://www.markshuttleworth.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/notify-osd-screenshot.png (even if Mark S. said "Our implementation of the notification display daemon will display only one notification at a time" http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/253 but we can read "f two bubbles are on a display simultaneously"... at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotifyOSD#Bubble%20behavior)

However you may be right concerning the document/content centric approach. It's weird that that point is not documented (unless i'm mistaken)