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Notification UI Overhauled in KDE 4.10 (And a Plan For Modernized Notifications)
Via Planet KDE, some good news for people who hate the KDE 4 notifications applet (coming in KDE 4.10): "So, it seems it's that time of the year again... the plasmoid used in KDE Plasma Desktop to display notifications and the progress of transfer jobs started to really show its age, due to some bad limitations in the old QGraphicsview code to handle complex layouts, so it appeared quite buggy and not so smooth to use. ... The fact that there is some research/development being made to build a new backend for notifications that will support many new features, more 'modern' to be actually useful with the applications that are so heavily 'communication' oriented (both desktop clients and web stuff), that became essential part of out workflow. ... The story begins more than a year ago: we needed a way to display notifications on Plasma Active, and obviously the desktop applet used back then wasn't enough. ... Since we would have to rewrite it in QML anyways, we started it."
The article has two videos: one of the new UI in Plasma Active on a tablet, and another of it on the desktop. They share basically the same code base, differing only by a couple hundred lines of QML. In addition to this, another KDE developer has been musing on a replacement for the freedesktop.org notification protocol designed to fix the deficiencies that have made themselves apparent over the last few years (parts one and two).
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Looks like that group of whiners will finally move off of Gnome 3 and Unity, and start talking about how EVERYONE hates the new KDE.
It's a step forward from the mysterious program in the taskbar unable to display a message due to not being run through a console and a bouncing mouse cursor going for 15 seconds.
I always have to disable them. Too often, they continue bouncing for all 15 seconds even though my app is already loaded, or perhaps isn't going to open a window at all.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
I've done quite a bit of code but I fully admit to being a lightweight at GUI development. Having said that, QML makes the design of the interface pretty easy... even including wacky animations & stuff. Here's a link to some Python based QML tutorials: http://www.pyside.org/docs/pyside/tutorials/index.html
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
I'm serious, how do they keep screwing this up? That looks hideous. Look at WebOS for a simple notification system. A small unobtrusive message appears at the time of notification. A small icon remains when it is unanswered. You can drop it down and swipe it away.
Perhaps you'll have better luck if you state your feature request over here.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Is there any chance that KDE could get OpenLDAP auto-configuration some time this century?
Not a chance in hell.
What happened to the idea that Freedesktop will come up with the standards, Gnome and KDE will implement that, and app developers will code to a single standard (and library)?
As it is, I'm guessing that if you have a KDE program running on stock Ubuntu, it's not going to show notifications in the Ubuntu way (upper left corner)?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I was being factious. OpenLDAP support has been a requested feature of KDE since KDE 3.5 was around. It has been repeatedly rejected, even back in 2006 when Buchan Mline was a Mandriva employee and made a KDE to OpenLDAP Schema for Mandriva Corporate Server.
As long as they don't do what they did with the PIM suite and the monstrosity that is akonadi. That is some very badly developed, badly tested software. I stopped using Kmail in favour of Thunderbird because of it and I wish I had done it sooner. Hint to KDE devs: Linux is a multiuser desktop. People want to log in remotely from home as the same user that is logged in from work. akonadi does not handle this. I've had mail with subject, sender and body stuffed up. Seriously guys, who is responsible for that massive disaster? It was just plain unnecessary to pollute what is otherwise a decent email client with that crap.
...that the KDE folks are working at making the little details better, rather than the Gnome fix-what-ain't-broke philosophy. (Not meant to start that old flame war, but mentioned because it's nice to have choices.)
Count me as one of the people who found the Windows 95 desktop to be a godsend. Taskbar, docking for a handful of everyday applications, a clock so I know when it's beer:30, and one comprehensive "start" menu to find stuff I don't need that often. There's a reason this design has been so successful: it's intuitive for most everyone. KDE 3.5 -> 4.0 wasn't a major change, just like Win95 -> Vista. (Referring to UI there, not core) There were, of course, growing pains for both, but by KDE 4.8 and Win7, pretty much worked out.
If we want to yet again bring up the conversion of Windows users to Linux, KDE is the only Linux DE that isn't a confusing pile of shit to a Windows user. It's a virtually painless transition, especially if the user in question has already gotten used to cross-platform applications like Firefox & Thunderbird.
My job has programming and sysadmin duties, so I'm not exactly a fresh-from-MS noob. Do I lose nerd cred for using a DE that resembles Windows? Meh. I don't care. I've got KDE where I want it -- clean, simple, organized, a workflow I'm used to for 15+ years, and exactly the right amount of eye candy. I've no interest in using an incomprehensible desktop with tons of keyboard shortcuts just to prove I'm 1337. :-)
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
to figure out how to make a popup
what? did you want balloons and a party at monkey joe's?
I don't get it, why they want notifications to be so huge, continually visible and include all kind information when not related to current task?
I so hoped that they would listen community what has come with better ideas like: Passive notification system with intuitive actions
I voted that (and so seems lots of people) but still need to wait that idea author or someone else would implement that.
Great if they actually improve things, but I suspect they will make things worse.
Overall once the kinks were worked out of 4.x, I found it to be pretty nice. Except for the nepomunk/akonadi/sematic dersktop junk, which seems to compete with the Windows registry for causing difficulties and chewing up resources.
The worse part. I've listened to the KDE developers and they actually like it.
Especially after KDE 4.9.1 finally started working properly with Compiz. That's my primary desktop at work after I had to leave GNOME3.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
How about some love for Colibri notifications? No, you don't get the copying notification, and you can't have interaction, but they're pretty, customizable, and basically disappear on a mouseover.
Actually, this was the biggest issue that people had w/ KDE 4.x, - Akonadi - mentioned below. Once they fix that, one of the biggest issues about KDE 4.x spped will be resolved.
So they're naming it KDE 4.10? In that case, they should have called its predecessors KDE 4.01, 4.02....4.08 for the current version. I thnk they should have instead called it KDE 4.91, and kept incrementing it, and hopefully terminating it in favor of KDE 5.0.
Incidentally, what's the current status w/ Qt 5.0?
Oh get stuffed. Nobody is whining for free work. It's perfectly valid to point out that (even free) software lacks a feature you want. If somebody's offering free ice cream, hell yes I'm going to point out that it's only pistachio flavor. It's just an observation, not a whine.
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