[Gambas-user] Balloons, everywhere but when I don't want them.

[Tobias Boege]

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017, adamnt42 at ...626... wrote:
> Probably obscure, but I'll give it a go anyway...
> 
> This project has about 80 or so Timers running at any given time, when they fire some stuff is updated and then a balloon pops up to alert the user that some update has happened.  All fantastic.  
> 
> And an added bonus is that the balloon pops up on any virtual desktop. Which is even more fantastic as far as I am concerned and exactly what I have been looking for for some years.
> 
> What is not so great is that when this happens on the desktop where the app is running, not only does the balloon appear, but the actual form that produces the balloon gets popped up to the top of the desktop. Which is infuriating if the user is actually in another app on that desktop. Even further, the project itself has a bunch of popup forms where the user can enter manual updates of some data. When the balloon appears (and the main form) the popup is lowered and you cannot bring it back to the top layer.
> 
> I'll try a more concrete example (or two), to see if I can explain what I am trying to do a bit more clearly.
> 
> I have my email client (sylpheed) running, every so often it goes and checks for incoming mail.  If there is some new mail a boxy looking thing appears at the bottom right corner of the screen telling me I have new mail. No matter which desktop I am actually on at the time.  A bit later that boxy thing fades away. It doesn't interrupt what I am doing in any way, nor does it pop up the main email client screen.
> Similarly, on my laptop I have Batti running which when I'm getting a bit low on battery power pops up a message in the desktop panel telling me to plug the damn thing in. Again this does not interrupt what I'm doing.
> 
> So, how can I achieve the same effect in gambas?
> 

Sounds like a feature of your DE (and I'm not good with DEs) but a quick
search suggests something called libnotify for sending desktop notifications.
It is said to be toolkit- and desktop-independent, but you need a conforming
notification daemon running -- which you may already have, if you can see
notifications from other programs (assuming they use the same machinery).

So, I guess you would need a gb.libnotify component (it really doesn't look
hard to do, there's only maybe 3 dozen functions in the library and it seems
you only need as few as 5 of them to show your first notification).

If you can't do that, there seems to be a tool called "notify-send" which
looks like it lets you access all the library features via the command-line.
That said, notify-send does nothing on my desktop, probably because I don't
run a fancy notification server...

Regards,
Tobi

-- 
"There's an old saying: Don't change anything... ever!" -- Mr. Monk