Comments/discussions?

I agree with most of it.

I do think the tabs are useful, however. I thought of a way to avoid it, but it takes far more space so I won't recommend it.

I also do not think there is a way to get rid of the scroll bars, although scroll bars that only scroll over a very tiny area like in your picture should never happen. So if the hidden part would be less than, say, 20% of the total area, the box should expand and/or the contents shrink instead.

What happens when source and destination file names are different? What happens when source and destination paths are the same?

I think, rather than having a "More" button at all, you could use the same expand/contract button icon that is used for the entire notification section (in the upper-right corner in this picture). This would probably be in the upper-right corner of each progress section. I would then move the stop and pause buttons to the left of the actual progress bar, since these are logically grouped with progress. There should also be a pause/stop button pair to the left of the overall progress bar (with a warning dialog asking if you really want to stop all jobs).

I would think something like 6:26 min remaining would be better. I don't like "eta" (which should be capitalized, being an acronym), and I am not sure it is localizable.

The gap between the notification header and entries and the progress header and entries is also inconsistent. This should be fixed.

Maybe splitting progress and notifications into two separate system tray icons might alleviate some of the size issues as well. It is possible to disable one or the other, but it does not appear to be possible to have two notification widgets in the system tray, one for notifications and one for transfers.

The button to do something in the notifications should always be aligned with what you are going to do it to. So "Open destination" should always be aligned with the destination to be opened, "Chat" should always be aligned with the person to be chatted with, etc. This is the same rationale for the earlier suggestions for the stop and pause buttons (since they are changed the progress) and the more/less buttons (since they apply to the entire entry).

There is a random bit of border at the very top that does not appear to serve any purpose.

You don't need "open destination" and a link to the destination. You should have one or the other, preferably the former.

I would also move the progress rate up to the individual progress item header, along with the filename. This would be consistent with the overall progress header and would save a lot of space.

Yeah if the other problems were fixed, the scrollbars _should_ fix themselves. As for tabs, one of the first issues is that when there is only one source of notifications, eg Kopete, it still shows two tabs. Tabs should be hidden until needed.

When source filenames are different, it should detect this and say "renamed to foobar". Otherwise, this "detail" is not useful to the user and should not be shown. When paths are are the same, the file must've been renamed, so the same solution can apply.

I agree with your "more" button and the pause/stop buttons. Honestly most of the time we don't want to see so much information about a task. We just want to see that it's happening, and when it'll be done with. The actual details about what's going on inside a task should (imo) be hidden by default.

Agree with the time issue.

I _don't_ agree with splitting it into two notifications areas. It seems too much like unwanted complications and just avoiding the mess.

I think the random border bit should appear when there is more notifications to show that can't fit the screen. However in that screenshot it should _not_ have appeared. Perhaps a bug.

Ah yes, I just looked again and realised that the path was clickable in the finished tasks. Perhaps all paths should be clickable? Including in the in-progress notifications?

Agree with the progress rate suggestion.

I would like to add the complaint of the number of notifications left in the icon being hard to read. Is it not possible to put the number in a non-aliased pixel font? Here is an example: http://www.dafont.com/bitdust-two.font - see how readable it is even at small sizes. Having it white coloured with a 1px black stroke will make it very readable. Perhaps we don't even need to show the number - just have it show on the tooltip! Honestly I already find that having swirling rotating bars spinning around my pie chart already annoying, and a number in the middle just makes it worse. This is probably a good place to throw out the suggestion to find a less annoying way to show "in progress" than those rotating watchamathings.

some of the issues noted in that screenshot have (and are being) corrected in trunk, like the various alignment issues.

some design choices (like the big side images, and the tabbar) will remain as they are pretty central concepts of the design.
I hope to post a blog entry before the 4.6 launch to detail what changed in notifications and jobs in the meantime.

Hmm, as central the tabbar might be, I don't see it being needed if there are only Kopete notifications. We don't need "All | Kopete" if there is only Kopete.

But most importantly, I hope the overall goal I put in the image is the same as what the developers feel.

yes, hiding the tabbar when there is only notification type, (as well the global scrollbar when there is only one job) make sense, i hope to be able to make it work before 4.6

notmart wrote:some design choices (like the big side images, and the tabbar) will remain as they are pretty central concepts of the design.
I hope to post a blog entry before the 4.6 launch to detail what changed in notifications and jobs in the meantime.

Could you please add an option to turn off the history? Like in
http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Sy ... ent=119268
(doesn't work in 4.5, at least not for me). I know the history has its uses, but for me (and probably others or the alternative version wouldn't have been created in the first place) it is next to useless and only gets in the way.

As an example: I like to have a popup telling me the details of new mails as
they arrive (I'm using Kontact) so I know if it is something I need to pay
attention to right away. If it isn't I can just let the popup slide away after the timeout. That is, if it wasn't for the history. With a history I need to manually get rid of entries periodically or the systray will always look like something important has happened. Which is especially annoying if I leave Kontact (to continue with the same example) running in the systray while I leave for lunch. If mails arrive when I'm gone, I have two kinds of notifications to alert me of that:

1. A popup history that I need to purge
2. The kontact systray icon

One or the other would be enough if you ask me. Two is redundant.

I guess I could just set the systray to always hide the notification icon but there are two problems with that (mainly cosmetic, but kinda annoying nonetheless):

1. Upon login, I get a plasma-popup in the center of the screen with the names and icons of all hidden entries (partially overlapping as well).
2. The systray icons are not centered in the tray. The leftmost one is closer to the edge of tray than the rightmost one.

See http://imagebin.ca/view/6rs5iT.html for how it looks with the notifier hidden,

and

http://imagebin.ca/view/wHUKqhkA.html for how it looks with it shown.

This is using the oxywin plasmatheme, but I get the same no matter what theme. When hidden, akregator (in this case) is far too close to the tray boundary. Okay, maybe I'm being picky but it does look jarring to my eyes.

Are those two known problems? I've tried, now that this thread was started, to find bug reports that seems similar but I must admit that I suck at finding relevant bugs at b.k.o. If they're not, I'd be happy to report them.

If those two bugs are fixed, I don't care whether the history can be turned on or off since the history would not get in my way either way.

By the way, for those who missed the post by notmart about the updates to the notifications (which tackles many of these issues outlined in the original post), here it is: http://www.notmart.org/index.php/Softwa ... ications_a

I wonder how to add a attachment to the thread in KDE forum.

You can't. You need to use a third-party hosting service.

I must say with 4.6 most of the issues I've had with the notifications have been fixed. The only thing niggling at me right now is the occasional mismatch of icon sizes.