xubuntu-devel Digest, Vol 44, Issue 19

[Steve Dodier]

Hello,

I've had a quick look at what had to be done in order to unify notify-osd to
Xubuntu. Before talking about this, I'd just like to ask : shall'nt we first
define what notifications we want before choosing the server we'll use ?

I'm personnaly very pleased with notify-osd, because :

   - Notifications are displayed one by one, thus not intrusive
   (xfce4-notifyd displays them all at a time in the same corner, making them
   unreadable).
   - It's sexy. The way it fades in and out is very nice, and it looks
   really great on my desktop (xfce4-notifyd is much sexier than
   notification-daemon, but not as sexy as notify-osd imho).
   - When you hover the mouse on it, it goes transparent and lets you click
   through it. This is *wonderful* when for instance you were about to click
   on a tab / button in the area where the notifications are displayed. And it
   does happen !
   - It's not possible to force the notification's timeout to 0 with
   notify-osd. No more staying notifications (i don't know xfce4-notifyd's
   policy regarding this).
   - No actions anymore ! I see this as a feature. Often, with a
   notification with actions, if you wanna click it to see what's below, you'll
   accidentally trigger the action that'll open and focus a window and bother
   you even more.
   - Nice integration with brightness/volume notifications. These just look
   clean when activated, and I do like them. For the moment, under XFCE, only
   the brigthness one works. See below for how to get the volume one.



About unifying notify-osd with the Xubuntu desktop, there are two things I'd
like to say :

   - Notifications do work with XFCE compositor. The lags of the brightness
   control are due to something else, and a bug is reported :
   https://bugs.launchpad.net/notify-osd/+bug/337861
   - We can get the sound notifications too. Apparently it's a dbus message
   sent by aumix to gnome-settings-daemon, so I suggest we also add a dbus
   message from aumix to xfconfd and in xfconfd we can add the code that'll
   display the notification. I've got source code for how to display such
   notifications. It's in the bzr branch of notify-osd, in
   examples/icon-value.py


I know xfce4-notifyd has been a lot of work for the XFCE devs that made it,
but I think notify-osd is a really great thing, and we should work with the
Ayatana devs (responsible of notify-osd and the incoming indicator-applet)
in order to integrate what they do in Xubuntu, and make our own XFCE
versions (without GNOME deps ofc) of their work, since the point of being an
Ubuntu flavour is taking profit from the Ubuntu devs work.

Cordially, SD.

-- 
Steve Dodier
OpenPGP : 0E5E4ECB
IRC : SiDi on irc.freenode.net
Jabber : sidi at im.apinc.org
steve.dodier at gmail.com
https://launchpad.net/~sidi
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