Comments on: Ubuntu and Desktop Notifications

By: Mike Hearn

Mike Hearn — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 17:38:43 +0000

I also worked on the very first implementation of this notification system, several years ago.

“though we may not display notifications sent through that API that use capabilities we are suggesting be deprecated.”

Is this for real? Am I asleep? Apparently not, but sadly this kind of madness is not surprising coming from the Ubuntu/Debian world. The whole concept of significantly and silently changing upstream user interfaces in such a way is asinine.

Do they have any concept of trademarks, brand names or backwards compatibility at all? Are they REALLY going to break existing software and go on a giant patch spree? Didn’t they learn ANYTHING AT ALL from the OpenSSL fiasco?

Apparently no. These guys don’t live in the real world do they?

By: Gary Kramlich

Gary Kramlich — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 05:51:16 +0000

Oh, and i forgot to mention, 4 years ago would be 2004, not 2002-2003 like you said in IM the other night. Still wondering why I’m pissed? (sorry for the spam, but i don’t see a way to update a post)

By: Gary Kramlich

Gary Kramlich — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 05:49:35 +0000

I never intended this to be public on here, and was assuming you would moderate the post out of existence. However, 4 years ago we were on the same page with two different methods, now however it seems you have stepped away from that. -fin

By: ChipX86

ChipX86 — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 19:43:25 +0000

@Gary: Much of this post was based on discussions in e-mail with others since you and I last talked two days ago. The proper time to be upset with me was 4 years ago.

@Yannick: I wonder that too. This is a good question to bring to the Ubuntu guys.

@rawsausage: I fully get the importance of this problem. It’s an issue we were aware of when we first developed this software nearly 5 years ago. I believe a HIG/best practices document is going to be developed. We also drafted categories and severities support into the spec right at the beginning with the eventual goal of letting users filter out/block noisy apps.

@Christian: It was great seeing you! We need to hang out more when you’re here next. Definitely keep in touch :)

By: Christian Kellner

Christian Kellner — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 15:22:58 +0000

Hey Christian,

nice blog post! I totally agree with everything you say, and I am so glad that I pinged you about this all during UDS and that you agreed to come over! It was good seeing you again and I hope it doesn’t have to be another year to see you again.

Merry Christmas!

By: rawsausage

rawsausage — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 10:56:56 +0000

Well, you’re also one person who is missing the point entirely. It’s solving the symptoms instead of the problem once more. The problem isn’t that that current notification system is bad. The problem is that the computers spam the user in the first place and are not intelligent enough to solve things. It causes the user having to tend to the lame computer stuff instead of solving their real life problems. 99.9% of the present notifications are just stealing the users’ precious attention without any real benefit.

By: Yannick Defais

Yannick Defais — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 09:58:30 +0000

Hi,

It is not clear to me how Ubuntu will replace actions that are present as now in Gnome.

Ekiga 3.0 do use action within notification for incoming calls and is in the dev tree of Ubuntu as a main component.

I would like to know more about their plan about it.

Best regards,
Yannick

By: Gary Kramlich

Gary Kramlich — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 08:49:45 +0000

I love how theres subtle differences between this and what we discussed last night… But I’m done discussing this…