UI suggestions

[Gary Kramlich]

Sean Egan wrote:
> 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.

This has my blessing ;)

-- 
Gary Kramlich <grim at reaperworld.com>