Notifications

Notifications are good and bad in the desktop experience: often they distract our work, but at the same time permit us to act where needed at a given moment. An example of "inevitable" notification is the one triggered by incoming chat sessions: attention by the user is instantly required due realtimeness of the communication media, with flashing icons, popup windows, sounds and more. An "evitable but suggested" kind of notification is the one which occours when new mails are coming: you can live without that, but you would need to constantly look at the mail box to perform by hand what the computer can perform automatically.

Given it is quite impossible to enterely drop notifications about events happening in our virtual workspace, we can engage relational desktop's potentials to refine and filter activities from which we can be interrupted by, providing a limit to the number of unrequired and useless alerts. Lobotomy has been designed to manage arbitrary sets of data, selected by queries more or less complex. It would be not so difficult to dispose notifications which are triggered when a given result set changes, due creation of a new element matching the definition or due modification of an existing element.

Implications of this system are defined by a simple example: if I'm waiting for a mail from a given contact, I can select all messages received by that person and activate the standard notification with a procedure identical for all of them (e.g. pressing a function button). That way, an alert will be presented not when any mail is received (forcing me to run to the mail client, just to discover someone wants to sell me some Viagra), but only for those with metadata in common with messages previously selected (in this example: the sender's contact).

Other valid examples may be an incoming chat session from a person grouped in a given pool, creation of a document in a target shared device, or update for a specific RSS feed.

In this scenario, notification stay active until not disabled explicitely, and a specific set of icons would permit to check and act on running notifications at any time.