Comment 337 for bug 332945

mac_v: A notification that a window has popped up? You mean something like this screenshot? That's how Mac OS 9 did it a decade ago. Its main problem was that there was no direct way to get from the notification to the actual window, violating the principle of direct manipulation; and the same would be true of a Notify OSD bubble. That's why we say notification bubbles should be primarily for notifications that *don't* need an input response (with IMs skating on the edge of that category, because seeing an IM in a notification bubble sometimes makes it unnecessary to switch to the chat window). Now, how to present windows requesting attention when the window list isn't visible is an important issue, not just for updates but generally. The same is true for how to indicate windows that are minimized. If you have ideas about how to do those things, we'd be interested to read them on the Ayatana mailing list. That this bug report is filed under NULL doesn't mean anything like what you seem to think it does; this issue was recorded as needing an item in the Ubuntu release notes, that was done, and the people maintaining the release notes then had no interest in being spammed with further comments irrelevant to them, so they refiled it.

Chauncellor: That Mark has commented here several times is actually an unusually large involvement on his part for an issue that is tiny in the grand scheme of things. With some worthy exceptions (e.g. mac_v, Peter Whittaker, and George Dhoore), the comments in this bug report have largely repeated points made in the mailing list discussion, which he also saw.

puntarenas: That live.gnome.org page describes one possible design for Gnome 3, generated in an October 2008 brainstorming session before Notify OSD was even announced. It does not necessarily reflect the final design for Gnome 3, Ubuntu, or anything else.

Vincenzo Canza: Sorry, I hadn't seen that question before, and I don't understand why you're special-casing "the default intrepid desktop". I've already given part of the answer in <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2009-February/027568.html> ("Until now, Ubuntu has often used persistent interactive notification bubbles for these kinds of things..."). The rest of the answer is that Ubuntu isn't yet sophisticated enough to handle some of those cases. For example, when a hard disk starts failing, 8.10 did not (and 9.04 probably doesn't) open a window unprompted warning of this; instead, ironically, it opened an indefinite series of Nautilus windows unprompted. <http://ask.metafilter.com/118440/Why-does-my-File-Browser-keep-opening> On the Ctrl+Alt+Backspace issue, I am not remotely suggesting that forum users are "stupid". It was perfectly understandable and predictable that they would vastly overestimate the proportion of potential Ubuntu users for whom that key combo is more useful than harmful. That was my point: they're not a representative sample of users.

mb_webguy: It may be possible to provide a notification without interruption that is effective for most potential Ubuntu users, but I don't know what it would look like. For example, I'm at a loss to understand why you think a notification bubble "timed to appear periodically" above everything else would be less annoying than a window that opens once and then sits in the background until you deal with it. (And as I have explained previously, that the window belongs to "an application" is irrelevant. <https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/332945/comments/127>) I welcome other ideas, though.

getut: It is not true that "Users have no choice with the Ubuntu updater". Not only is its behavior configurable, but if you have used Synaptic or apt-get or any other update mechanism since the updates became available, Update Manager will stay away.

George Dhoore: Those are interesting and well-thought ideas, thank you. For #1, even if we solved the learnability problem, we'd still need to make the icon reliably noticable, and it's not clear how we'd achieve that without being more annoying than (for example) just opening the updates window. Consider the case where you've been putting off installing updates for a few hours, and now Ubuntu coincidentally detects that your hard disk is failing as well. How would you communicate this greater urgency? I suggest exploring this idea further with some mockups on the Ubuntu wiki, and mailing the Ayatana list about them. For #2, it seems the biggest problem would be the amount of space it would consume, especially on netbooks.

bdoe: If you are still having this problem, I suggest subscribing to the <http://www.ubuntu.com/usn> feed, and then reporting a bug the next time a package you have installed shows up there without Update Manager opening within a day. We'd take that very seriously.

Ralph Green: Best of luck! We look forward to seeing, on the Ayatana list, the results of your experiments.

Paulo J. S. Silva: I will be responsible for the design of the messaging menu in Karmic, so I have a pretty good idea what the indicator-applet is intended for. The Ayatana mailing list is at <https://launchpad.net/~ayatana>.