robi_sabocanec
January 10th, 2011, 12:16 PM
To all of you that don't like notify OSD, here is how you can get good old notifications that one can click on.
Motivation:
After reading about Notify OSD, I've found out that it has been done according to some standard, and, most likely, the standard was done towards OS X notifications system. Everything look nice IMHO, but using it is frustrating.
Many applications rely on notification system, take Gwibber, for example, you get notification of new tweet which contain a link, but to open the link, you have to go to the actual app (gwibber) and then open a link. What's the use of notification in that case? And if you want to keep the notification displayed a bit longer, you instinctively move your mouse pointer over it, but than the notification gets blurred and you no longer see what's on it. Totally counter-intuitively.
Also, I'm using Dropbox for sharing, so when someone add a content to our shared folder, I get notification which says something like "... click to open a folder...". But, again no use of click, I have to manually open nautilus etc.
In rational, designers say they want to protect user from accidental clicks. This is a bad argument IMHO, users aren't stupid, there is a plenty of other ways to make harm to your computer.
One more thing that bothers people is that you can't change the notification's position on the screen without patching notify-osd. Notification position can become real issue when you have two monitors for example.
So, I decided to disable notify OSD and give a chance to notification-deamon, which does what I expect it to do, although it's not an eye candy.
Firstly, I tried to uninstall notify-osd, but that's impossible since ubuntu-desktop package depends on it!!!
Here is another way to do it:
1. Install notification-deamon (sudo apt-get install notification-deamon)
2. Open /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service (You can backup this file if you plan to return to notify-osd later)
3. Change the 'Exec' line to
Exec = /usr/lib/notification-daemon/notification-daemon
4. Save the file and restart computer
I also want to say that for an average user this may look complicated and it is one of the design decision which makes harm to linux popularity.
Regards
Motivation:
After reading about Notify OSD, I've found out that it has been done according to some standard, and, most likely, the standard was done towards OS X notifications system. Everything look nice IMHO, but using it is frustrating.
Many applications rely on notification system, take Gwibber, for example, you get notification of new tweet which contain a link, but to open the link, you have to go to the actual app (gwibber) and then open a link. What's the use of notification in that case? And if you want to keep the notification displayed a bit longer, you instinctively move your mouse pointer over it, but than the notification gets blurred and you no longer see what's on it. Totally counter-intuitively.
Also, I'm using Dropbox for sharing, so when someone add a content to our shared folder, I get notification which says something like "... click to open a folder...". But, again no use of click, I have to manually open nautilus etc.
In rational, designers say they want to protect user from accidental clicks. This is a bad argument IMHO, users aren't stupid, there is a plenty of other ways to make harm to your computer.
One more thing that bothers people is that you can't change the notification's position on the screen without patching notify-osd. Notification position can become real issue when you have two monitors for example.
So, I decided to disable notify OSD and give a chance to notification-deamon, which does what I expect it to do, although it's not an eye candy.
Firstly, I tried to uninstall notify-osd, but that's impossible since ubuntu-desktop package depends on it!!!
Here is another way to do it:
1. Install notification-deamon (sudo apt-get install notification-deamon)
2. Open /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service (You can backup this file if you plan to return to notify-osd later)
3. Change the 'Exec' line to
Exec = /usr/lib/notification-daemon/notification-daemon
4. Save the file and restart computer
I also want to say that for an average user this may look complicated and it is one of the design decision which makes harm to linux popularity.
Regards