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Hi everybody,

In the last few days, I was testing some distros with KDE 4.2.2. Overall, I liked most of features of this current KDE version, but there was one thing (and application) that make come back to KDE 3.5.9.

One thing that really bothered me a lot was the notification dialogs that popup when you do almost anything in KDE 4.2. The idea is interesting, but sorry to say that don't work at all, since the dialog distract you all the time, appears from nothing and sometimes stay there, like when you are using Kopete.

And Kopete make the system almost impossible to use, this notification appears like crazy, on top of the any window, demanding my attention even when I don't want to be disturbed. In this bug below there are some complains about the notification behavior, specially in Kopete, but also a fix for the huge number of dialogs:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=182481

So what I suggest? That the notifications be displayed in the taskbar, something similar of what Amarok does, shows informations in a bar at the lower part of the window, something very good IMHO, since I can continue using the application, even knowing that something demands my attention.

Why not to use the taskbar in a similar way, as a center of information? Most of the time it lays there, doing nothing. This way you can get rid of the system tray also, making the application icons display what the software is doing and what he wants you to do (ignore or view a chat window, per example).

Look at this **** mockup that I did. Kopete can show the notification at the side of it's icon, you can continue to use the system without be interrupted and the dialog can stay there for some time, or always, for critical messages. It can also vanish when you hover the mouse with the desire to use some other areas of the taskbar.



I know this is not perfect, and the taskbar needs to be large for this to work, but the current notification system is worst than the previous one in KDE 3.5.x, so why not discuss this, right?

Thank you, and sorry for my bad english.

I think the kopete example should be a different "kopete systray applet" or even a seperate plasmoid.

But I totally agree with you on matters of the current notification system being messy.

The mockup version does not work. Example I have the panel autohiding on desktop and on netbook it is on "windows can cover" mode. If there would come a notification, I would need to check it by bringing up the panel first and to switch to it. And the kopete mockup is a bad example because you can click the panel entry of that. I have configured the Kopete so that on current desktop messages are not new.

And we need one central place to have notifications, not different places. I do not like systempanels on applications and I try to hide them if just possible.

And the Amarok2 way does not work because it is limited to only that application what is shown. I have multiple windows open in background and I can not nurse them by checkin periodily when does there happend something.

The current way is the best, it still could be tweaked littlebit like making better animation to show the pop-up smoothly coming up or appear with a fading in/out effect. So it would not distrub so much just by popping up from there.

I haven't used kopete for a while not but last time I used it the notifications where horrible, I was speaking or rather someone else was speaking with me and just kept sending very small messages (it was not someone I wanted to block but just do the thing I had to do) and I had a whole pile of notifications. I would prefer it if all these messages would have appended to the original notification.

Maybe it could be an option:
-all new messages a new notification
-append per contact, notification per contact
-append messages from all contacts to single notification
-only show last message (per contact)

And we need one central place to have notifications, not different places.

Since presentation of notifications is configurable and the implementation of the current popup notifications is potentially replaceable as well (should be possible to provide an applet which sits in a panel and shows notifications like the thread starter suggested.

As this is not one of my areas of expertise I don't have any details, however I believe that the overall notification architecture would allow to have extremely different setups without harming traditional ones.