[sldev] Notifications redesign

Argent Stonecutter secret.argent at gmail.com
Tue Feb 12 17:47:41 PST 2008


On 2008-02-12, at 16:59, Rob Lanphier wrote:
> Are there any open source desktop apps (or for that matter, any  
> desktop apps) that handle notifications correctly in your book?

I am not aware of any desktop software that handles notifications  
really well. Ideally this should be handled by the OS, or by a common  
notification framework like Growl on the Mac. In fact I'd have to say  
that Growl is about the closest to the right kind of framework to  
make it possible to really do a good job with notifications on the  
desktop.

The main problem is that alarms in control systems are a log, and  
desktop operating systems don't integrate notifications and logs at  
all. Both the Windows event log and UNIX syslog have some potential  
to be used that way. Of course most of what currently gets logged in  
either of these have to be treated as non-critical, because if they  
were critical they'd have called a panic or a system stop instead. :)

I certainly don't have all the answers, either, but I am heartened by  
the fact that you're interested in the question. :)



More information about the SLDev mailing list