UI suggestions

[André Lemos]

Gary Kramlich wrote:
> 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.
>   

I also agree that guifications would be overkill, and gaim-libnotify[1] 
seems like a much better, cleaner and simpler alternative IMHO

[1] http://gaim-libnotify.sourceforge.net/