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Back in my Gnome/Compiz days I used the water effect plugin for notifications instead of an audio notification. Using a wee one-liner (below) for IM and mail produced a lovely little ripple effect in the center of my desktop that faded away within 2 seconds.

This allowed me to remain notified without the annoying audio clips.

It would be nice if this was implemented in a similar fashion so that any package that allows the user to run a command on notification as an alternative could make use of the water effect and not limited to Kmail and Kopete.



Short, bad quality clip of the notification: waterping.ogv

Code: Select all

dbus-send --type=method_call --dest=org.freedesktop.compiz /org/freedesktop/compiz/water/allscreens/point org.freedesktop.compiz.activate string:'root' int32:`xwininfo -root | grep id: | awk '{ print $4 }'` string:'amplitude' double:1 string:'x' int32:825 string:'y' int32:512


Feel free to retag the subject if I've gotten it wrong.

Any screenshot of water effect plugin for notifications

I think that would be a very usefull feature. I often has to work without any sound (at the university for example) and then such a notification would be nice to have.

I like it to. Power of silence is what many of us need.

While there are other already existing options, like KDe notifications system from system tray, and "blinking" the monitor, both are boring and the secodn is also ugly.
So I'm all for a nice desktop effect to notify the user.

I like the idea, kinda like when invalid input is given in MacOS the window shakes.

Another possibility is for the window that triggered the notification (if there is one) would cause ripples to emanate out from the window's edges (even if the window is not visible). Sort of like if the window vibrated or pulsed suddenly (you would not see the vibration and/or pulse, only the waves). If it was from something without its own window, the ripple could appear from where the notification icons are (even if they are off-screen because the panel is hidden or under something). This would be particularly useful in the future, where you will be able to divide up notifications across different system trays and other applets thanks to the improved notification spec Aaron is working on.

Very nice! Beautiful, functional and even has accessibility benefits. I think it's worth pointing out that this idea is far more flexible than just water effects. If a user could choose *any* effect for *any* notification people would come up with all kinds of beautiful customisations to match their needs. You could have it switch to the "work" activity/desktop when someone from work IM's you, and then to the "friends" activity / desktop when someone else IM's. Have the desktop start snowing when a Kuiserver job (copying / cd burning / creating large archive) finishes. There's all kinds of things you could create easily with this. Don't like my suggestions, you could easily create better ones.

Ideally we would see a new column in notifications configuration for "Desktop Effect", just as we currently have "Play a sound" "Show a pop up" and "Mark a taskbar entry".

If implemented in a flexible, user friendly way, I think this idea is one of the best I've seen here. I just hope that people look at the idea itself and don't get caught up thinking this all about water effects...

May be it would be nice if start configuration of ripple was not just circles, but depends from application. For example for incomming kopete messages start configureation was the picture of calling contact. For system notifications - letter "i" inside circle, and so on.