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Shuttleworth Proposes Overhaul of Desktop Notifications
Thelasko writes "Mark Shuttleworth is considering a controversial overhaul to the way Ubuntu manages notifications." I'm not thrilled with all of the changes proposed, which would mostly value simplicity over confusion at the expense of flexibility and permanence. But anything that would make more people read over and specifically approve the wording of error messages and other notifications is a good thing.
This looks to me almost exactly the same way KDE 4 notifications work. Just a slight change in the bubble look.
So the entire summary is Thelasko's opinion , with a one sentence description that links to shuttleworth's blog? Perhaps a true summary of proposed changes in Ubuntu desktop notifications would have been more informative.
I like it. Maybe I'm alone here, but note in the article that Shuttleworth says that some notifications are important and should be treated differently (as "persistent panel indicators") - but there's no reason why you should have to click on "Wifi stopped working" and "Wifi started working", hence distracting you from what you're doing. Exploring new ideas is more important than whether they're good or bad, especially four months ahead of release.
xterm -n 8
Our hypothesis is that the existence of ANY action creates a weighty obligation to act, or to THINK ABOUT ACTING. That make notifications turn from play into work. That makes them heavy responsibilities. That makes them an interruption, not a notification. And interruptions are a bag of hurt when you have things to do.
Then what, exactly, is the purpose of the notifications? If not to invoke immediate action, then just send an email summary at the end of the day of all the "notifications" that happened in the last 24 hours. Short of showing changes in a network state, what would be urgent enough to show immediately, on top of all other windows, but not important enough to want to address at the same time?
"Your download is complete." I'll want to open the file.
"You have new email." I'll want to read the email.
"Your mom cried when she read your heartwarming birthday card." I'll want to pick up the phone.
What are these mysterious notifications that won't invoke a desire to perform some sort of action from the user?
<cluebat>
Other humans do what's important to them, not what's important to you.
</cluebat>
<description type="job">
You don't control people, you control machines.
You do your job so others can do theirs.
</description>
If it's that important to perform a remote restart, drop a widget on the machine that enables remote control.
OK, where to start... I'll leave aside the wording of your email, seeing as most people will glaze over as soon as they see it's from IT in the first place.
1. Your email is more than 5 lines long. IME, most people don't read beyond the first few lines so there's no point in bothering with any more than that.
2. You expect your end users to jump through hoops for nobody's benefit but your own. Wake on LAN should deal with PCs that are turned off, if they're not turned off I leave setting up a remote reboot script to your imagination.
3. Rewritten email:
"We will be applying updates to your PC, part of which will involve remotely rebooting your system at 20:00 tonight. Please notify us if this is inconvenient".
And this is acceptable to you? This is exactly what you shouldn't have to do.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."