Ayatana notifications for Plasma

Introduction

The idea of this patch is to provide an alternative experience for passive notifications (aka without actions) in Plasma, while retaining the current interface for active notifications.

When “Lighter passive notifications” is enabled in the configuration of the system tray plasmoid, passive notifications appear in the top-right corner, and are queued: if three notifications come at the same time, they are displayed one after the other to reduce spamming. These notifications use the Plasma tooltip background so that they are well integrated in the desktop, while looking “lighter” than the regular notifications. The notifications smoothly fade in on start and fade out when done. They also fade out when moving the mouse over them.

2009.09.02: after some discussions with Celeste Lyn Paul, Kubuntu interaction architect, and other members of the Kubuntu community it was decided to go a bit further and turn active and passive notifications into Ayatana notifications if “Lighter notifications” is enabled.

Screenshots

• Powerdevil
• Kopete
• Configuration

Installing/uninstalling the binary

To install:

cd /path/to/plasma_applet_systemtray-YYYYMMDD.so.bz2
bunzip2 plasma_applet_systemtray-YYYYMMDD.so.bz2
cd /usr/lib/kde4
sudo mv plasma_applet_systemtray.so plasma_applet_systemtray.so.old
sudo cp /path/to/plasma_applet_systemtray-YYYYMMDD.so plasma_applet_systemtray.so

To uninstall:

cd /usr/lib/kde4
sudo mv plasma_applet_systemtray.so.old plasma_applet_systemtray.so

In both case, if Plasma does not restart itself:

kquitapp plasma-desktop
plasma-desktop

Download

20090923

• KDE trunk patch: kdebase-trunk-20090923.tar.bz2

20090908

• Changes:

  • Made position configurable and added “Preview” buttons. See updated configuration screenshot.
  • Reworked layout a bit more

• Patch: kdebase-workspace-4.3.1-20090908.tar.bz2

• Karmic Binary: plasma_applet_systemtray-20090908.so.bz2

20090907

• Changes:

  • Do not show the “unknown” icon if application icon was not specified
  • Degrade correctly when running on a non-composited desktop

• Patch: kdebase-workspace-4.3.1-20090907.tar.bz2

• Karmic Binary: plasma_applet_systemtray-20090907.so.bz2

20090904-1

• Changes:

  • Scale image to ensure we don’t get huge notifications
  • Align labels correctly
  • Unbreak support for application icons

• Patch: kdebase-workspace-4.3.1-20090904-1.tar.bz2

• Karmic Binary: plasma_applet_systemtray-20090904-1.so.bz2

20090904

• Changes:

  • Use Plasma and KDialog margins

• Patch: kdebase-workspace-4.3.1-20090904.tar.bz2

• Karmic Binary: plasma_applet_systemtray-20090904.so.bz2

20090903

• Changes:

  • Turn all notifications into Ayatana notifications
  • Implemented fade out and click-through on mouse over

• Patch: kdebase-workspace-4.3.0-20090903.tar.bz2

20090902

• Changes

  • Configuration UI
  • Fixed count in extender task (the (i) part of the plasmoid)

• Patch: kdebase-workspace-4.3.0-20090902.tar.bz2

20090901

• Patch: kdebase-workspace-4.3.0-20090901.tar.bz2