Hello fellow plasma developers, I am writing you, with my kde-telepathy developer hat on, to ask for some advice regarding some design issues we have in the kde-telepathy project regarding user notifications.
As we already know, the current knotify & plasma notification system allows us to define events that can be shown as popups on the tray, played as sounds, etc... This is a good approach for some kinds of notifications, which are passive - i.e. do not necessarily require user attention, such as showing an incoming instant message or a job completion notification, etc. However, we are currently in need of showing some notifications that must *not* be passive - i.e. the user should notice them and act on them. Some examples are: - Incoming file transfer: "User foo is sending you a file. accept/reject" - Incoming audio/video call: "User foo is calling you. answer/reject the call" - Incoming desktop sharing invitation: "User foo wants to share his/her desktop with you. accept/reject" Unfortunately the current notification system is not good enough for those, because: - Plasma notifications autohide (and there is no way to keep them persistently shown, even though there are options for that in the KNotification API and the .notifyrc files...). This is a problem because if the user is not looking at the screen when the popup is shown and it hides before the user has a chance to see it, he won't be notified of the event. - It is possible from systemsettings to turn off the popups and let it just play some sound for example, which leaves the user with no way of accepting/rejecting the request (and the daemon that shows the requests has no way of knowing that there is no popup actually shown). Typically, this is solved with dialog popups. krfb for example does this, and I think kopete too. However, I think that this is not the right solution in a modern KDE plasma desktop, as it is too intrusive (stealing focus, etc...), let alone that kwin by default does not allow such popups to steal focus and get on top, which means that they are hidden behind the active window and the user still doesn't get properly notified. So, I think that the proper solution would be to extend the plasma notification system somehow so that it supports such notifications. Any thoughts? Have you ever had anything like that in mind when you designed the notification system? Best regards, George _______________________________________________ Plasma-devel mailing list Plasma-devel@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
