Written by badp the 29 Apr 09 at 17:26.
Category: Usability.
Related project:
Nothing/Others.
Status: New
Rationale
It may happen that a notification pops up while I wasn't looking at the monitor. Typically, I only realize when the bubble has disappeared and then the notification is gone forever.
FYI: This is by design, there are supposed to be no logs of it since all notifications which does not perform anything but "notify", should be ignorable if you missed them.
Removing interactions and logs is one step in ensuring that users shouldn't bother if they missed any notifications.
However, I think their reasoning on that is wrong, so +1.
Every application has its own log, so why produce redundant logs?
i.e. why logs every pidgin notification, when pidgin itself can log its conversations?
jamesw(Ubuntu developer)
wrote on the 30 Apr 09 at 12:43
~/.cache/notify-osd.log is a log file.
The intent is that the notifications are ephemeral though,
so that if you miss them it does not matter. The log is
slightly hidden, as it's intended to be for debugging.
If a notification might want your action, then it should
leave something to show that, such as calling for attention,
or using the messaging menu, so that you don't need to go
back and look at the log of the notifications.
If you miss the notification, you are missing the information that it contained. You might miss a "new message" notification, for example. This is bad.
I truly like the idea of logging notifications as one method of providing persistence for users who may miss notices. As jamesw points out, this is already being done though in a non-persistent file (only exists for the duration of your session). Personally I would prefer persistence just for troubleshooting scenarios but no big deal for now.
I also like the idea of stickiness while idle although logging could mean that only one notice would need to be sticky and it could be simply remind the user that missed notices can be viewed in the log. Since it disappears when the user does something it is very unobtrusive.