[Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Alerting users in case of write errors

[Gary Martin]

On 14 Jun 2010, at 02:04, Michael Stone <michael at laptop.org> wrote:

> Gary wrote:
>> On 13 Jun 2010, at 12:57, Anish Mangal <anishmangal2002 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> An alert like a chat or Activity sharing invitation would be nice, but one
>>>> with a more visible signal is needed.
>>>> We really really really ... need a general notification system. :D
>>>> Please no popup error dialogue windows if you can avoid it ;) The alert
>>>> strip that displays under the toolbar is a much more friendly notification
>>>> for the Sugar UI design.
>>> Thanks for the insightful responses. I have used a slightly modded
>>> version of NotifyAlert (aptly called NotifyRedAlert). A sample
>>> screen-capture can be found here...
>>> http://people.sugarlabs.org/~anish/sl1842-journal.gif
>>> Note: The link above is a big animated gif (~1.8M) and some browsers
>>> may struggle to display it.
>> 
>> Yea, my iPad chocked half way through :)
>> 
>>> If this seems fine, I'll mail the patch for reviewing.
>> Looks nice. The colour fade (red to black over the time-out countdown) is
>> something new and not in the Sugar HIG, but I don't have an objection — makes
>> fair warning UI sense and could be something we adopt elsewhere when needed
>> (if there aren't too many objections).
> 
> Anish, Gary,
> 
> I like the color fade too but the red hue is, for me, a bit overpowering.
> 
> Have you considered any alternatives like, for example, only applying the red
> to the border of the alert

Not a big fan of borders, feels a little fussy, just a personal thing perhaps :)

> or using the user's colors instead of red?

Interesting idea. It would suggest warnings coming from someone, yourself, perhaps confusingly in this case. If you could truly separate all warning actions that you directly trigger, from warning events that an Activity may trigger (the usual black), you might get away with it — though hopefully these new cases will be so rare it might not be obvious why some are user coloured and some are not.

I could certainly imagine a collaborative activity that had a growl like set of (stacking/fading) user coloured alerts just under the toolbar to indicate significant events. It could be used to indicate user arrivals and departures, while preserving canvas space. This might even be the place for the in activity 'bubble' chat that Eben was always hoping to expose.

Perhaps the red glow is indeed one step too far given the rather strict colour metaphor in Sugar?

Regards,
--Gary   

> Kind regards,
> 
> Michael