UI suggestions

[Sean Egan]

On 6/17/07, Gary Kramlich <grim at reaperworld.com> wrote:
> 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.

After some discussion in #guifications, I think we all reached an idea
for merging Guifications2 into Pidgin that we're all very happy with.

The current "Sounds" tab in the preferences dialog will become
"Notifications." The complicated "Sound Method" group will have
Guifications "Show notifications on monitor" preference added
somewhere around there, iff the user has more than one monitor.

Guification's "Position" preference will try its hardest to find a
Docklet and position itself there. Failing that, it will default to
the bottom right.

It's "Stack," "Animate," "Mouse action," "Display time," and "Max
visible guifications" options will be removed, and their defaults will
be used.

Guifications' "Show while away" preference will be merged with "Enable
sounds: when available, when unavailable, never" option, to becomes
"Enable notifications: etc."

Similarly, the "Sounds when conversation has focus" preference will
also affect Guification notifications.

Guifications' "Notifications" page will be merged with "Sound Events"
on the new "Notifications" pref page, and renamed simply "Events." A
second checkbox will be added: instead of "Play," we will have
"Audio," and "Visual." Guifications currently contains a super-set of
Sound Events; the Guifications events will be added (which scores us
$100 from Murray Gray!)

The "Themes" page will be replaced by a single dropdown on the
"Interface" tab in Preferences, along with smiley themes and stauts
icon themes (sidenote: Etan is currently adding status icon themes and
moving it and the smiley theme selection to dropdown menus in the
Interface tab).

I think this all sounds great! What do you all think?

-s.