[Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Messages notification

[Martin Dengler]

On Sat, Nov 06, 2010 at 03:07:29AM -0300, Martin Abente wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 1:44 AM, Martin Dengler <martin at martindengler.com>wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, Nov 05, 2010 at 06:02:28PM -0300, Martin Abente wrote:
> > > Hello amigos,
> > >
> > > Recently I encountered many situations where a system-wide
> > > notification-messages system is required as a basis for many bug fixes or
> > > enhancements.
> > [...]
> > > Currently, Sugar does not have a mechanism to communicate to users
> > > different kind of information about sugar itself.
> >
> > What about the notification system?  The Log activity?  The Journal
> > Full warning?  The Frame?  There are a lot of communication
> > mechanisms, but they dn't seem to do what you wnat:
> >
> >
> 
> * The notification system only shows an icon floating, and if you want to
> show a message you have to implement a palette manually, not so DRY
> considering all the use cases.

I'm not sure what you mean by "DRY".  The reason - I guess - for only
the icon is because text requires translation and literacy (a point
you make later).  I prefer text (obviously, since we developers work
with text as much as possible) but this requires a change to the HIG.
We should think hard about why, and justify it.

> * Why the user should start an activity to know what is happening?

I know, this is odd for developers/computer people.  I personally
don't like it (I really liked the "quake terminal"[1] approach), or
having four activities to read e-books. But a) it's what the HIG[2]
says, for some good reasons (it's not better to have text flashing by
all the time -- have you seen how many exceptions are in shell.log!?);
and b) it's not a new approach: OSX has the "Console" log viewer,
Windows has the Event Viewer.

> Even if they do, do you think all that pile of text is really
> helpful? (for a developer, sure.. for a 7 years kid probably not,
> and if you want him to understand you would have to translate the
> log messages anyway).

Wait, that's my argument you just stole :).

If you're saying the error messages should be better, I don't think
anyone would disagree.

> * The journal full warning is actually a problem to be solved, #630.

Wow, I can't believe it's taken 20 months to fix it.  I guess it's not
that critical :(.

> * What about the frame?, currently it
> does nothing about this issue. (except for the floating pulsing
> icon)

That's exactly what you wanted, but with icons instead of text: a list
of the messages from Sugar, without starting an activity.

> Again, why should we force users to start an activity to know what is
> happening.

To summarise:

1) Because the HIG tells us to, and nobody's proposing changing the
HIG
2) Because Sugar UI should strive for simplicity, not tons of alerts
that only a developer would understand
3) Because it's not clear what advantage over the existing
notifications + Log activity you think will exist.

> > > I invite everyone to share their ideas on how this feature could
> > > work and look.

Well, those were my ideas.  When you have something more I'm sure we
could have a more constructive discussion.

> We need sugar to tell the users what is happening otherwise they will never
> guess it, that is exactly problem in the first place. I can't imagine a kid
> having to check the log activity every 10 minutes to see if the automatic
> backup has started recently.

I can't imagine any more than a few kids at each deployment (so,
that's say 100 of 1.5 million laptops) ever wanting to see if the
automatic backup has started recently.

> Anyway, if someone does not like the messages and wants just wants to read
> the log every N minutes they could be disable it :):):)

In my experience, every time you show some information to the user
that isn't actionable, they hate it.

> > Saludos
> > > Martin (tch) Abente
> >
> > Martin

Martin

1. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Quake_Terminal

2. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Human_Interface_Guidelines#Simplicity
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