UI suggestions

[Gary Kramlich]

Sean Egan wrote:
> On 6/17/07, Aleve Sicofante <asicofante at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm new to this Pidgin list. I've been using Pidgin in Windows for a few
>> weeks and I'd like to point out a few UI issues I've found:
> 
> Welcome, and thanks for the well-thought-out e-mail.
> 
>> Show a tooltip in the system tray showing the friend's name and a little
>> text ("Fred has just logged in" or "Martha has just logged out").
> 
> I've read the rest of the points in this thread, and I agree with you.
> Guifications-like-behavior should be part of Pidgin, proper---not as a
> plugin. I've asked Gary (the Guifications maintainer) about this a few
> times. I've had Hylke mock up a few good default themes for it, which
> he's done (They're on my other computer; if the thread is still alive
> tomorrow, I'll post them).
> 
> That said, saying it should be done is much different than actually doing it. :)
> 
> Guifications, itself, is far too complex to fit well as part of
> Pidgin, proper (although it works well in its own light, as a plugin).
> Ideally, I would want to have a single "on/off" switch (or perhaps
> some other small number to configure what you want notifications for),
> and maybe a single drop-down for a theme.

<snip>

As Sean mentioned, we've hashed over this before, many times.  The 
issues are, Sean wants it stripped down to the point where I can no 
longer use it how I use it.  This in and of itself are unacceptable to 
me, and thusly why I have no desire in doing this.  Aside from that, 
anyone tracking Guifications 2.x development would be able to tell you 
that not much has changed in the past year or so, except to keep it 
functional.  This is mainly because I'm working on a bigger more 
flexible version of Guifications, which breaks out of Pidgin in an 
attempt to consolidate all of the rogue notification behavior out there 
that ends up drawing right on top of another rouge notification.

However, there are quite a few things I would be willing to remove to 
help get Guifications 2.x into pidgin-proper.  Stacking direction 
(default to vertical), Animate (default to yes), display time (default 
to 6 seconds; the current default), Mouse actions (with sensible 
defaults), per blist-node theme selection, and Max Visible Guifications 
(Notifications) and default it to something like 6, the current default. 
  I also, would not be against removing themes, IFF we have a "Pidgin 
Theme" that would define how to draw the notifications as well.  Keep in 
mind, I'm the first to admit how horribly broken the layout and 
rendering of themes is, and that this would not be an easy task.

I do however disagree on simplifying the number of notifications. 
Guifications 2.14 current supports 19 notifications, buddy pounces 
support 10 (most covered by guifications 2.14), and there are others 
that pidgin now shows in the buddy list that guifications 2.14 already 
covers.  We should *NOT* be showing notifications in numerous places, 
assuming that the user will know all of the areas to check, which is why 
I am against simplifying the number of notifications.

For anyone that is curious, the behavior I *require* out of guifications 
2.x is this.  I run X in a disjoint setup, which means that I have two 
(or more) monitors, that are not "One Big Desktop(tm)".  Which in turn 
means I have 2 X displays; :0.0 and :0.1 (think two root windows).  I 
run pidgin on :0.1 which is to the right of my direct view.  Since it's 
out of my way, I want my notifications visible on :0.0 which is directly 
in front of me.  This is one of the behaviors Sean wants to remove.  He 
suggested detecting where the tray icon is, but the communication 
between an application and a fd.o notification area is done through an 
XAtom, which is all done on a *single* root window.  Since I have 2 root 
windows, this doesn't work, and I would lose functionality that I require.

> -Sean.

This ended up being way longer than I intended it to be, but I hope this 
has clarified the situation a bit, and why it's not a simple thing to do.

-- 
Gary Kramlich <grim at reaperworld.com>