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Windows

Windows 11's Widgets Can Now Trigger Notifications on Your Taskbar (theverge.com) 71

Posted by msmash from the not-that-anyone-asked dept.
Microsoft is rolling out a taskbar notification system to its Windows 11 widgets this week. While the weather widget returned to Windows 11 earlier this year, it's largely been a static experience that displays a sunny icon when the weather is good and an umbrella icon when it's raining and sucks to be outside. That's all changing this week, as Microsoft is now adding live animations to this taskbar widget. From a report: All Windows 11 users will start to see these new widget notifications in the coming days and weeks, thanks to an update to the Windows Web Experience Pack that powers Microsoft's widgets feature. The notifications appear as live animations on the taskbar weather widget, and include alerts for thunderstorms and even ticker alerts when stocks you're following go up or down. "When something important happens related to one of your other widgets, you may see an announcement from that widget on your taskbar," explains Microsoft in a support article. "These announcements are meant to be quick and glanceable, and if you don't interact with them, the taskbar will return to showing you the weather."
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Windows 11's Widgets Can Now Trigger Notifications on Your Taskbar More

Windows 11's Widgets Can Now Trigger Notifications on Your Taskbar

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  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @10:31AM (#62796971)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • This idea reminds me of the scene in Airplane II with Shatner sitting inside the moonbase. [youtube.com]

      I mean, down here there are literally hundreds and thousands of blinking, beeping, and flashing lights, blinking and beeping and flashing - they're *flashing* and they're *beeping*. I can't stand it anymore! They're *blinking* and *beeping* and *flashing*! Why doesn't somebody pull the plug!

    • They do know that the primary use of a computer is to get things done, right?

      You do know computers act the way you configure them right? Don't want to see a distraction on the task bar? Hide it or disable the widget altogether. Don't want a notification, disable them.

      Hell for all your high and mighty talk I bet you haven't even pressed the "Focus Assist" button.

      Email and chat notifications are a necessary evil (and should be mutable.) Pretty much everything else popping up is completely moronic

      What is important or a necessary evil varies greatly by user. I for one couldn't give a flying **** when I get an email and have those notifications disabled. I on the other hand do have ToDo enabled for notifications.

      The too

      • You do know computers act the way you configure them right? Don't want to see a distraction on the task bar? Hide it or disable the widget altogether. Don't want a notification, disable them.

        That would be nice if Windows would honor my choices, but every time there is a feature update I spend another half hour fixing the distractions that Microsoft re-enables.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Well their telemetry is kinda the issue. Most of us IT guys turn off all notifications in Win10 but the general population either doesn't know they can be turned off or doesn't know how, so Microsoft assumes people like it and just keeps expanding on it
      • The problem I have found with this MS philosophy of Windows is these "features" they think will be great for the user experience turn out to be terrible for the user experience. The best description I read once is "over-eager child on caffeine" in terms on how these features add to the user experience. Frankly I turned off almost all notifications in Windows as it was alerting me to every single inconsequential thing. All this change goes is make notifications a spam vector. Before it was "USB drive added .

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Dracos ( 107777 )

      Windows is designed to be sold, not used.

    • They do know that the primary use of a computer is to get things done, right?

      If I'm writing something, I don't want to be distracted.

      If I'm reading something, I don't want to be distracted.

      Then you shouldn't have bought a client-server operating system, windows up until windows 7 was a local applicaiton (aka ran entirely from your PC) windows 10+ is a client-server app (aka hence the spyware) and forced updates.

      This was a part of a long term strategy to dispossess the ignorant PC gaming and windows win32 application using masses.

      Microsoft, AMD, intel and others began a project around 1997 to kill the personal computer, called by many names but is trusted computing - aka a removal of your cpu'

    • I agree the default notification settings are annoying, but you can configure them per-application or disable them entirely or even pause them temporarily. You shouldn't have to, because notifications should be opt-in, but you can.

  • Provided I can shut them off, go for it. I'm sitting on top of a ridiculous amount of computing horsepower, and 95% of the time, it's idle. The given use cases make sense to me - opted in stock movements, weather notifications (severe thunderstorm perhaps)... sounds good. Be prepared to jump on abusers, though. Otherwise you poison the receptive well within me.

    • I fear that those helpful notifications will be leveraged as a spam vector. "50% chance of rain. Umbrellas on sale at store near you.” "Google down $1.25 at noon. Have you considered buying MSFT stock?"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kmoser ( 1469707 )
      You say that now, but just wait until a runaway process brings your CPU's usage to 100%, just because MS wants to show you a pretty animated icon that you never asked for in the first place, and your only recourse is to hack the registry to remove it or wait for the next Windows Update that will (hopefully) fix it.

      • one that kills me is the Samsung Magician software. ffs yall, no one needs to see those spinny-ass animated hula hoops just to check on their SSD firmware. someone watched too much The Matrix

      • Which part of, "provided I can shut them off" is giving you trouble?

  • Widgets are just desktop gadgets that you can't put on the desktop without third party software like Widget Launcher.

    Microsoft terminated Desktop Gadgets because they couldn't make them work securely.

    My crystal ball says BOHICA

  • Only to find stupid "upgrades" like you can't get seconds on the clock anymore and have installed a 3rd party app. Seconds must be an advance feature. Also, you can't right click the taskbar to get Task Manager like you have been able for since forever. Annoyances.

    • I don't by their argument for this. They say refreshing the taskbar every second was consuming a lot of resources on terminal servers and cloud servers, but they could just disable it in those scenarios and be done with it.

      Mind you I don't know why you would want seconds displayed. If you need that kind of precision then a stopwatch is usually a better option. Or if your boss reprimands you for being 10 seconds late then a different boss may be a better option :-)

      Also, you can't right click the taskbar to get Task Manager like you have been able for since forever.

      Sure you can, just do so in the bottom left

  • Push notiications are almost all bad (Score:4, Interesting)

    by LeadGeek ( 3018497 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @10:48AM (#62797053)
    The only push notification I want is that the building is on fire, a terrorist is outside the door, or that production is offline. Push notifications need to be incredibly important to me, actionable, and time sensitive. If it doesn't fit these 3 criteria, it doesn't warrant taking my attention off of whatever I'm doing.

  • Elephant... bell.. a Tamil adage. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @10:51AM (#62797073) Journal
    Already I find there are too many notifications, too distracting already.

    Jason has started a meeting,

    Bob has joined the meeting.

    Alice has left the meeting.

    Clueless has sent you a message on teams.

    There is a unread email in your inbox with subject: "Clueless has sent you a teams message"

    There is a message in your teams inbox saying there is an unread email in your inbox

    IT is going to reboot your machine in 2 minutes. No you can't reshedule it.

    There is a saying in Tamil, "the sound of the bell comes first, the elephant comes in later".

    Make no mistake, advertisement is coming in later. And no, you can't turn it off.

    • Already I find there are too many notifications, too distracting already.

      So disable them or use the Focus Assist feature to shelve them. The power is in your hands to control this, if you find notifications annoying it's because you're annoying yourself.

      Especially with Teams. Why do you have Email notification enabled when you already get notifications. That's just silly, turn it off, it's in the settings.

      Sincerely,
      Slashdot Techsupport.

      • Why? I could focus before. Why distract me first and then say turn off notifications? Why cant you leave it off by default and let me enable it if I want it? With all that AI investment, can't they figure out when it is too distracting?

        Yes, they can, but they don't care. You have already paid and bought the software, so no more revenue from you. But the advertiser is dangling cash in front of you? "Oh, my god, I could be sued for fiduciary irresponsibility if I don't grab that cash!"

        • Forget the lawyers, the order of removal is:

          1) The smug asshats that justify everything.
          2) The marketers / advertisers.
          3) The lawyers.
          ...

        • Why? I could focus before. Why distract me first and then say turn off notifications?

          Windows isn't built for *you*. It's built for the general purpose model of a standard user. Most of us don't need to seriously focus when using our computer. What are you doing here? Is this your idea of "focusing" on work? Clearly you don't "focus" all your time either. It only makes sense to have this a toggle feature, for the minority of time where a subset of users actually need to "focus".

          If you're reading this, get back to work.

          With all that AI investment, can't they figure out when it is too distracting?

          Yep because I'm sure your first thought is: I want windows to do more anal

  • "Is there a way to turn it off and if, how?"

    • Get away from MS windows. Even MS Office is turning to pure shite.

    • The usual answer to the clueless users applies: The same way you turn off the feature that already exists for other apps, and the same way you have for the past 7 years.

      • Finding a third party tool to do it?

      • But it is not always the "same way". If you are lucky, MS only moved the setting. If you are not lucky, you can spend some time before an Internet search reveals a complicated means to remove it (if possible).

  • How do I disable them?

    I don't want more distractions, I want fewer.

  • How do we disable this new bullshit?
  • users that microsoft have made it very difficult to remove. It's very gracious of them to force thinly veiled advertising vehicles on users who've paid real money for their OS. Coupled with their telemetry, windows is roughly as bad as Android for privacy and advertisements. At least google don't have the nerve to charge for Android, and it's open source.

  • Here's the notification I got from Microsoft: switch to Linux and stop dealing with Windows nonsense.

    • We're currently in the Extend phase. Did you know you can make powershell your default *nix shell? What do you suppose WSL is actually for?

      Escape from Mickeysoft ads to Apple ads or Google ads. They're very much making sure the goldfish can only be in 3 barrels. TPM 2.0 to lock you in to whatever they allow and only that - Monthly service charges coming soon!

      • They do that, and the cost of old machines that don't require this crap will skyrocket. They've already encouraged a surge of users to migrate to Linux. I guess they really want to kill themselves.

        Of course, that's the real end-game here. The era of corporate software houses has been on death's door for a while now. Things got good enough over a decade ago for most people. They've already cut software distribution down to bear minimum (aka. digital delivery / sales for most products). They've already made

  • Microsoft invented NTFS.
    And then couldn't make a File Explorer that could handle the file paths that their own fucking file system made.
    Microsoft are shit at programming.

    • On the other hand, if you go to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> ODBC Data Sources (32-bit) -> Excel Files -> Add... -> Microsoft Excel Driver -> Select Workbook...

      You can find that, in Windows 11, there is STILL the file selection dialog box from the Windows 3.1 era.

      I have extremely mixed feelings about code that old still technically being in active use.

      • Microsoft's two rules for OS releases:

          - If it ain't broke, leave it in.

          - If it was broke 20 years ago and this release still didn't fix it, talk about night mode, widgets and the new location for the start button.

  • Temperature, humidity, and a static icon to indicate general weather conditions. And a small but noticable red box popup for any life threatening weather conditions in my immediate area.

    Please M$, get this one right.

  • but that will be introduced later this year I guess...

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