unified notifications in xubuntu

Simon Steinbeiß simon.steinbeiss at elfenbeinturm.at
Mon Apr 27 13:39:38 UTC 2009


On Thu, 23 Apr 2009 12:01:01 +0100
Vincent <mailinglists at vinnl.nl> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I don't really do desktop coding so I'm not really up to scratch with
> regards to fd.o standards, but IIUC there is one standard for notifications
> that is adhered to by libnotify (the example implementation IIRC),
> notify-osd and xfce4-notifyd. Therefore, all applications that support this
> standard should be unified in not only Xubuntu but most Linux distributions.
> Unfortunately, some applications still prefer to show their own
> notifications.
> 
> Thus, what I'm trying to say is that you don't really need Xubuntu to look
> at it but each individual application that doesn't adhere to the standard
> (which most of them do, I'd argue).
> 

Hi,
I do understand your point. Nevertheless there are a few cases where I think Xubuntu
should do some work on the notification system. (The applications that don't adhere to the
standards are most likely to be patched by Ubuntu anyway, or so I like to assume.)

There are two specific use cases that came to my attention when I first tried notify-osd
a few days ago.
The first is the brightness control, which is neatly integrated in notify-osd. (That's
exactly the kind of "unification" of desktop appearance I'm referring to in this
discussion's title.) The other one is (audio)volume control. At the moment xfce4's mixer
is lacking a cli to achieve volume changes, but even so it's possible through workarounds
(like the small script I posted before). I think volume-changes should be - *by default*
- reflected in the notification system. At the moment xfce4-notifyd is unable to display
  bars and even if this doesn't change, I would argue that a display of percentage in
  numbers would be sufficient.

For other programmes like Skype I'm happy to share the few additional lines one needs to
add to Skype's $USERPROFILE/config.xml so that other users might take advantage of this
too. (Maybe a wiki would be a good place.)

Going back to brightness and volume control, I took a look at Ubuntu's notify-osd
Development Guidelines (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotificationDevelopmentGuidelines) and at
least for me this is too complex to sort it out. Maybe some of you are skilled enough
(and willing) to understand how they send the brightness/volume control through
notify-osd. (This would not only be helpful to adopt their method for xfce4-notifyd but
also to be able to implement volume-controls for Xubuntu users that prefer notify-osd
over xfce4-notifyd.)

So to finally return to your argument Vincent, I believe you are right that Xubuntu
doesn't have to patch tons of applications but it still would be nice if user's had the
choice between two notification daemons of equal functionality (at least as long as it's
unclear to which of the two Xubuntu will stick).

Just my two cents,
Simon




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