Notifications: uselessness of

[Steven Harms]

If you can disable notifications, I really don't see this being an
issue.  If you are "in the zone" and don't want to be interrupted,
that should work just fine.  Am I missing something?

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 12:14 PM, Lars Wirzenius <lars at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> ke, 2009-02-25 kello 09:43 +0000, Mark Shuttleworth kirjoitti:
>> Oliver, this was not constructive feedback.
>
> I'm going to give some more harsh-ish feedback. I'll try to formulate it
> politely, but I apologize beforehand for failing to do so.
>
> Notifications are always interruptions. When something new pops up on
> the screen, it interrupts my thought and my work, and if I'm "in the
> zone" (also known as "in hack mode"), that interruption may cost about
> fifteen minutes of effective work time.
>
> It doesn't matter what it is that pops up on the screen: be it a
> notification bubble (old or new design), a new window that causes the
> task bar to change, or an application that causes its task bar button to
> blink. Or something else.
>
> I don't like it when those things happen. All applications should, in my
> opinion, strive to interrupt the user as little as possible, especially
> by default. If the user really wants to be notified of every incoming
> e-mail, that's fine, but by default, in my opinion, the Ubuntu desktop
> should consider the vast numbers of people who use their computer as a
> tool, rather than as a toy. (I'm sure more people use computers as toys,
> but they should then be happy to go through the menus to enable all
> sorts of notifications.)
>
> The notifications I would like to see are for serious things: when I'm
> about to lose data, or cause a security breach to happen, or endanger
> someone's health or property. Trivial stuff like new e-mail or IM
> messages or highlighted lines on IRC should be turned off by default.
>
> Most applications don't have a way to configure off notifications. For
> example, Epiphany always notifies me when it has downloaded a file. Most
> of the time, this happens within five seconds of when I initiated the
> download, making the notification useless. Other times, the download
> will take a while, perhaps up to hours, and I don't care exactly when it
> ends. I would prefer to ask to be notified in specific instances when I
> do care, rather than be uselessly notified all the time.
>
> Because of this, I find all the work that is going into making
> notifications prettier to be misdirected.
>
>
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