Windows style notifications

Submitted by secretsquizza on Sat, 02/18/2012 - 01:42
Description: 
Be nice to see windows style notifications (speech balloon things in the bottom right) when things happen in soulseek (eg someones sent a message to you, download complete etc.) especially nice if these were configurable. The old style "pings" could be pretty annoying and intrusive at times.
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Submitted by Nir on Sat, 02/18/2012 - 12:53.

What is your opinion of the flashing dock icon?

nineinchnick's picture

Submitted by nineinchnick on Sun, 02/19/2012 - 03:29.

I would like to see configurable notifications like this using libnotify on Linux. After a quick search it seems a cross-platform solution in Qt doesn't exist, not even a decend 3rd party library. So you'd have to code it two times. I don't think such solution would get a high priority if any.

Submitted by secretsquizza on Sun, 02/19/2012 - 10:46.

The flashing dock icon? You mean when the taskbar icon flickers between the soul and the other icon? It's useful... but its a bit too "low key" as I use the autohide on taskbar and the soulseek icon generally is hidden, so I need to press the "up" arrow to see if its flashing (kinda ruins the point of it).

I think nick's got a fair point - cross-platform interoperability might make it more difficult to implement... bring back the pings if there's no other option!

Submitted by spiralx on Sun, 02/19/2012 - 11:26.

Under Windows Vista/7 dock icons get hidden due to inactivty or user configuration, so there's no guarantee it would be visible at all, and even if so it's not easy to get one that catches your attention without being annoying - the floating notifications are easily visible and disappear after a few seconds which is more effective. But I agree there's no cross-platform equivalent unfortunately!

Submitted by Nir on Sun, 02/19/2012 - 17:41.

Yes, there appears to be no easy cross-platform solution here. In the case of Windows 7, you can at least drag the tray icon from the hidden area to the visible area to make sure it stays there. But I realize not everyone wants the SoulseekQt icon permanently in their tray. On OSX, I believe I can use QApplication::alert to make the dock icon bounce until the application is activated again. On Linux, I'm really not sure... QApplication::alert might be a good solution as well. I'll experiment with it on these platforms.

Submitted by secretsquizza on Wed, 02/22/2012 - 00:00.

The only other comment I'd make around the flashing dock is it does not tell you what kind of alert has occurred, just something has happened, so you don't know whether its something you are wanting to ignore or not. In the case of the notification bubbles, they can have a message like "file X has downloaded" or "user blah has sent you a message"...