Notification UI Overhauled in KDE 4.10 (And a Plan For Modernized Notifications) 67
Via Planet KDE, some good news for people who hate the KDE 4 notifications applet (coming in KDE 4.10): "So, it seems it's that time of the year again... the plasmoid used in KDE Plasma Desktop to display notifications and the progress of transfer jobs started to really show its age, due to some bad limitations in the old QGraphicsview code to handle complex layouts, so it appeared quite buggy and not so smooth to use. ... The fact that there is some research/development being made to build a new backend for notifications that will support many new features, more 'modern' to be actually useful with the applications that are so heavily 'communication' oriented (both desktop clients and web stuff), that became essential part of out workflow. ... The story begins more than a year ago: we needed a way to display notifications on Plasma Active, and obviously the desktop applet used back then wasn't enough. ... Since we would have to rewrite it in QML anyways, we started it."
The article has two videos: one of the new UI in Plasma Active on a tablet, and another of it on the desktop. They share basically the same code base, differing only by a couple hundred lines of QML. In addition to this, another KDE developer has been musing on a replacement for the freedesktop.org notification protocol designed to fix the deficiencies that have made themselves apparent over the last few years (parts one and two).
Er... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm serious, how do they keep screwing this up? That looks hideous. Look at WebOS for a simple notification system. A small unobtrusive message appears at the time of notification. A small icon remains when it is unanswered. You can drop it down and swipe it away.
Re:Freedesktop standard? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an implementation of the freedesktop notification protocol. The second part (overhauling notifications) presumably would become an fd.o standard after all of the kinks were worked out and the KDE/GNOME folks finished battling to the death over the details ;)
Don't repeat Akonadi (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as they don't do what they did with the PIM suite and the monstrosity that is akonadi. That is some very badly developed, badly tested software. I stopped using Kmail in favour of Thunderbird because of it and I wish I had done it sooner. Hint to KDE devs: Linux is a multiuser desktop. People want to log in remotely from home as the same user that is logged in from work. akonadi does not handle this. I've had mail with subject, sender and body stuffed up. Seriously guys, who is responsible for that massive disaster? It was just plain unnecessary to pollute what is otherwise a decent email client with that crap.
Re:Plasma Active 3 (Score:2, Insightful)
The swipe isn't familiar action for users, the X in other hand is familiar. The difference is that after learning swipe and as for touch screens, it is easier than pressing X. So disabling that X should be in options. But pressing multiple times X in same location, is simpler motion than swiping multiple times.