Rictus

Today’s word is rictus, meaning a gaping grin or grimace. Probably relating to me miss-spelling yesterdays word in the title or possibly other stupid things I did.

Notifications

Rodrigo makes a bunch of good points in his entry.

The dialogs that Gaim and Evo use are ridiculous and disturbing but just using notification bubbles doesn’t solve that. In my opinion Gaim or Evolution should never tell you, in a dialog or bubble, that it has gone offline or online. The only exception to that is when you actively try to do something with those programs. In Evolution if you try to check your mail or send a message, then it should make you aware that you’re offline and that won’t happen; a simliar for Gaim as well. So I agree that notifications of new mail are low priority and shouldn’t steal focus, but sometimes the dialogs are helpful like in my next example.

For notification history. It seems like there are two problems, one is that we want a way to look at notification history, and two is that an alarm like that shouldn’t go away completely until you’ve dealt with it. For the first part I suggested that something, like the notification area applet catch all notifications and save them. I guess the libnotify daemon process does this, so it should probably be integrated to display those from the capplet. The second one is just a matter of the application being smarter about the type of notification it’s showing. Perhaps evolution alarms should start off as a bubble up item when they first appear and when you only have 15min before they appointment they appear as dialogs. It just seems as though we don’t need to make a one or the other preference, but use the bubbles as low priority and when you’re about to miss your meeting use the dialogs as slightly higher priority.

As far as the implementation goes it doesn’t really matter to me at all what is used. I said the same thing to the Desktop team. I think we should be trying to use the libnotify work as much as possible and work with those guys because they’ve gotten a lot of good work done. However, I get the luxury of demanding the right type of notifications for people using the desktop before the implementations available.

If libnotify is the best thing so far that’s fine with me, they might just have to deal with me whining all the time until we figure out a solution.

Evince

Jonathan already talked about this, but it’s too sweet to not show it off. Evince has great text selection support, according to krh it’s the best text selection out there, it even supports themed selection colors!! And I guess Evince has jumped on the bus like everyone else. This opens Evince up to remote control for presentations and allows you to query evince for what documents the person currently has open.

Threats

Ok, so David Z didn’t actually threaten to punch me in the face, but he had that CRAZY look in his eye.

NetworkManager

I sat down with Dan and David not too long ago and worked out some design goals for NetworkManager. We basically wrote down some experiences we want the person using NetworkManager to have. Also we started on the Network Administrators experience admining and setting up NM. I’ll be posting that stuff soon and we’ll probably get getting a new website to reflect all the new information.