Comment 15 for bug 346095

On Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:00:53 -0000
Matthew Paul Thomas <email address hidden> wrote:

> That doesn't mean all options are bad. Sometimes an option would
> improve efficiency or satisfaction for some fraction of existing or
> potential users; and the improvement and the fraction may, together,
> be large enough to outweigh the option's disadvantages. (For example,
> accessibility options may be useful for very few people, but they can
> make a dramatic difference to whether those people can use the system
> at all.) So a proposal to add an option is most likely to be
> successful if it makes some effort to describe what sort of people
> would benefit, and how they would benefit. Just saying "It's a
> usability issue" is unhelpfully vague.

Not seeing how, even after it *has* been explained here, is just being
obtuse. I am *quite* sure that I am not the only person who has poor
peripheral vision and whose attention is largely focused on one
quadrant of the screen.

It clearly makes it easier for me if I can have the notifications pop
up in the area of the screen where I am most likely to see them. This
neither causes bloat nor makes the application unintelligible. For all
of the statements you've made, all you have done is secure the point
that we're trying to make in the first place that they should be
configurable in terms of placement.

I am not asking that it be configurable in terms of colors, shades,
fonts, placement, duration, serial alerts or parallel alerts, and
everything else. That'd clearly be a bit much, especially since any
application should use those settings from the base system, anyway.

But when it comes to visibility, for me and others like me (I
*strongly* doubt that I am the only person that works around his/her
vision issues in the way that I do, by positioning screen elements
where I can see them), it doesn't take much thought to realize that
this is a usability issue. If it does, you're thinking about it wrong.

notify-osd isn't the only thing where treatment like this from
Canonical is becoming a regular issue. I'm noticing treatment like
this in reporting even very obvious bugs that should never have made it
into the release, where it's being looked at as a non-issue and
probably won't be fixed. At least one of those bugs (re: the gnome
meta package) is a repeat offender and will be broken for yet another
release. Oh, well, I guess. Why bother filing reports, if they're
just going to get ignored and argued until they no longer matter
because the releases are supposed to be as immutable as possible, and
with immutable releases, fixing trivial bugs becomes artifically
difficult?

Maybe we should file a bug report (or series of them) on how bugs are
handled in Launchpad for the Ubuntu project. Or maybe that'd be just a
large a waste of time.

 --- Mike