cocoaforge

Me, I just ended up uninstalling Growl.

MagerValp wrote:

The_Tick wrote:Is this when you are playing WoW, or just normal 2d applications?

Normal 2D apps, I don't play WoW. The GMA 950 just doesn't keep up with 20 simultaneous fades.

The fades just seem to get in the way of my productivity. Every now and then I need to click something in the upper right (say, a browser tab), and there's a nearly-faded-out-but-not-really growl notification in the way that I end up clicking instead. The first few times it happens it's just an annoyance, but after a while it drives you google-to-find-the-disable-switch crazy

20 fades?

The_Tick wrote:

MagerValp wrote:

The_Tick wrote:Is this when you are playing WoW, or just normal 2d applications?

Normal 2D apps, I don't play WoW. The GMA 950 just doesn't keep up with 20 simultaneous fades.

The fades just seem to get in the way of my productivity. Every now and then I need to click something in the upper right (say, a browser tab), and there's a nearly-faded-out-but-not-really growl notification in the way that I end up clicking instead. The first few times it happens it's just an annoyance, but after a while it drives you google-to-find-the-disable-switch crazy :P

20 fades?

Yes. Especially when the machine is under a bit of a load the notices tend to bunch up - it chugs for a few seconds while ram swaps out, then you get hit with all of them at once.

How do you get 20 notifications on screen in the first place though?

I really want to turn off the fade in/fade out. I move around quickly, and it bugs me when I have to wait for animations that serve no purpose but to look pretty. Don't get me wrong; pretty is good -- as long as it doesn't get in my way.

Surely it wouldn't be any more complex to add a simple checkbox "fade notifications".

I, too, sometimes get a storm of notifications because of my RSS feeds. I like having them come up, but sometimes they hit me in batches.

Hi there!
I came to the forums just to ask for exactly the same feature.

The Fade effect is very annoying. When I click on the (X), I want it to disappear immediately so that I can access whatever function is behind it. If I click the (X) and then try and access whatever function behind it before it's completely faded, nothing happens because the popup still has focus!

The (X) button is completely useless as it would take the same amount of time for the notification to just go away on it's own.

I respect developers who only implement features of mass-appeal. This is one of those features. We really need the (X) button to work properly or at least provide a preference/hidden preference for it to work properly.

Cheers
Smeg.

The_Tick wrote:

MagerValp wrote:Normal 2D apps, I don't play WoW. The GMA 950 just doesn't keep up with 20 simultaneous fades.

The fades just seem to get in the way of my productivity. Every now and then I need to click something in the upper right (say, a browser tab), and there's a nearly-faded-out-but-not-really growl notification in the way that I end up clicking instead. The first few times it happens it's just an annoyance, but after a while it drives you google-to-find-the-disable-switch crazy

20 fades?

20 on a screen is nothing. Apps like Adium can throw many more, especially when it's pushed into the background and I've been away from my mac for a few minutes. option-click on a growl's x, and things start to fade... and maybe the screen will have cleared after 30 seconds or so, maybe.

The fade in can be just as bad. It causes video, in Safari, to stutter or pause. This on both my 300-MHz Smurf and 1.5 GHz PowerBook G4, OS X 10.4.11.

Please please please give us a pref to totally disable fade in and fade out both!
Growl should be always be snappy, and never intrusive!

Thanks,
- Dan.

When you get that many, do you read them?

The_Tick wrote:When you get that many, do you read them?

LOL Usually, I just want to get back to work. I've already wasted enough time waiting for the machine to come out of screen saver (slide show) etc. The growls are just in the way, so I opt-click one of the x's. Maybe one out of ten times, I'll hesitate on the click, to eye-ball them quickly.

And yes, I already removed the "contact signs on" growl from Adium. LOL That one added a whole new magnitude to the problemo.

- Dan.

First off, sorry for the length folks. Hopefully this should help you all understand why I've been asking what I've been asking.

I wonder if you'd be better off turning off that idle sticky setting.

Anyhow, my main problem here is that this is going to be an issue no matter what, if not with fading it's with general drawing time of webkit displays, or cocoa displays, or whatever else. Putting a checkbox in to disable fading is just not enough.

This goes back to a major concern about screen spam from Growl, more or less in that it allows Growl to become a nuisance rather than useful. There are more reasons than just a problem with WoW or with a slower machine (read ppc maybe? low amount of vram or memory in a shared memory situation?).

So the general way to look at this is to back up and look at the whole issue. The major problem is what? A lot of notifications from a couple of rather noisy applications right? The example of sign on's/off's in Adium is a good one, that's rather noisy if you have a lot of contacts and they all sign on/off. If you get every single message sent to you from GrowlMail and you get 150 emails an hour, that'd also be another good example.

So how do we solve this? I don't think a pref is the answer, this is why I've been kind of vague about asking random questions and trying to elicit a response that helps us move past this simpler "solution", and on to the more complicated to build but better, i.e. real, solution.

I think we need to do a few things:


- Implement simple "spam protection" to help counter "screen spam". Coming up with a way to show only notifications you really care about. So what if Adium sends you 100 notifications, if we can filter that down to 5 notifications you're going to care about, without forcing you to head to the configuration area, that'd be even better. I don't know how to do this, but we could use the antispam bayenesian filter api that 10.5 mail gives us to help go through and categorize notifications, maybe.

- Come up with a way to roll up all notifications into a small area until they can be reviewed if $n area of the screen is covered. Trillian used to do something like this actually when you go away, I don't know if they do anymore or not.

- Log notifications so that they don't get lost, and we can remove the awkward "Stay On Screen" preference entirely. Something similar to the Adium log viewer, but where you can double click the entry to replay it. Something like a rolodex. This has been something that I've wanted for at least 3 years with Growl, and we just haven't gotten to it yet.

- Work on these changes:

http://groups.google.com/group/growl-de ... 0537f3ce8c


We don't have enough manpower to work on all of this in a reasonable amount of time. With the amount of people we have, just one of these is going to take about 1-3 years of work. This is not to say that it all can't be done, we just have to pick and choose. All of these changes should resolve the issue entirely, at least my understanding of the whole issue. I'd be glad to be proven wrong, but at this point it's all just brainstorming. I drive 60 miles round trip to/from work every day, most days trying to figure out how to solve this exact issue. I've been thinking for months, and I think these are the boiled down answer to how to solve it.

For now you folks are going to need to figure out why you're getting so many notifications that they cover the screen. I have that only when testing Growl, which I don't do all that much anymore, but otherwise I don't get that amount on screen. I'd be glad to try to figure out better configurations with anyone who asks, but we're not adding a pref for fading due to the very reason that once we go there, how far do we really go? We'll end up with about 15 checkboxes just for something that should be resolved in a better manner.

hum. I'm thinking there are really two *separate* problems here.

(1) Growl performance.

(2) Growl flood (aka your screen spam).

Your post has some great ideas about how to address the flood issue! I dislike calling it spam, because those growls are really things we asked for; they're not unsolicited garbage at all!

But it's (1) that really concerns me. I see a growl start to draw, I look at it - and WAIT for it to fade in to a point where I can read it. Or I see a growl, and ignore it - because I know it's going to take foreeeeeever to fade in, then everything animated in my Safari window stalls or stutters. On the fade out side... I look at the growl, dismiss it, then WAIT for it to fade out, so my other windows return to their normal activity. "WAIT" = thoughtus interruptus - a frustration that's long enough to make me think about uninstalling Growl. I need them there gowls to SNAP onto the screen and SNAP off. They need to get outta my way FAST, without interrupting my work at all.

Now, it may be that there are further issues than just killing off that fade effect, that cause things to stall and stutter. But, from my pov, eliminating that WAIT would be a giant gain! So that's what I'd like to see done first. ... I don't think it's a low vram or memory issue. The slow fades & stutters happens even when only quicktime player is running with a small window and more than half of my memory is free. IMO, the ultimate cause is QuickTime. Other things, if overlapping an animation often cause stuttering. And it all started a number of QT releases ago. *shrug*

FWIW,
- Dan.

Just a few minor thoughts about your flood protection ideas...

The_Tick wrote:- Implement simple "spam protection" to help counter "screen spam".

Nice! This would definitely help with uncooperative apps such as Ircle, that just growls everything for the heck of it.

The_Tick wrote:- Come up with a way to roll up all notifications into a small area until they can be reviewed if $n area of the screen is covered.

- Log notifications so that they don't get lost, and we can remove the awkward "Stay On Screen" preference entirely. Something similar to the Adium log viewer, but where you can double click the entry to replay it. Something like a rolodex.

Wonderful! Please merge these two. A stack'o'recent'growls, that can be sorted chronologically and/or by app, then let me click through them really fast. Perhaps give Growl permission to use an "area" of the screen, and if it wants to put up more growls than would fit, automagically switch to the stack "mode". ohhhhh - a flip-book growl movie!

The_Tick wrote:For now you folks are going to need to figure out why you're getting so many notifications that they cover the screen.

Yea. LOL. I growl things wayyyy too much. Semi-intentional, I guess. The cool factor of Growl hasn't worn out yet. I expect I'll tame Adium down quite a bit, once (my) events prefs corruption issue is nailed down. Doesn't pay for me to tailor things until then. (Adium trac 10150).

FWIW,
- Dan.

Does a single notification cause this issue for you?

The_Tick wrote:Does a single notification cause this issue for you?

Yes.

And it doesn't seem to matter which "display option" I use, although some fade slower than others.

- Dan.

Is this on your g4 machine? How much vram/memory does the machine this is happening on have?

The_Tick wrote:Is this on your g4 machine? How much vram/memory does the machine this is happening on have?

The Smurf has 640 MB, the PB G4 has 1.25 GB.

The WAIT occurs on both machines. Perhaps a tiny tiny bit longer on the Smurf (as expected). That WAIT, to be honest, is never going to go away until that fade effect is removed. It's a human factors issue - the animation of the growl draws the eyes to it, then you get stuck waiting for it... Even a 1 second fade-in/out is toooooo long.

The stall/stuttering of animated stuff occurs more in the Smurf, but is still noticeable / annoying on the PB. It occurs less when I'm running WebKit than with released Safari, worse with Firefox. Ditto for anything playing with Quicktime Player. But then again - that occurs if *anything* intrudes on *any* window that contains animation, not just growled stuff. That's why I think it's just a lame quicktime issue, not a growl issue per se.

- Dan.

How exactly is a 1 second fade distracting though?

The_Tick wrote:How exactly is a 1 second fade distracting though?

One second is actually a very long time visually! That's 30 to 60 frames! As soon as the growl appears, your eye is drawn to it. And you sit there and WAIT until it's drawn enough to be readable. Then another second or so to read it (+/- your settings). Then another second to WAIT for it to fade out, before you can get back to work (remember, unless you have an uber fast Mac, other things aren't animating at full speed during this time).

Do that 10 to 50 times a day ... that's a lot of wasted time.

The above is "best case", if your Mac isn't too bogged. But what I see all the time is closer to worst case. For example: On my Smurf earlier today, I was watching a streamed news report from CNN. Got a growl from Adium. The video immediately started stuttering during the growl fade in, and its sound broke up. The actual fade in, because my machine was so "busy", took almost 10 seconds! After reading the growl, it faded - another 5 seconds. The video never recovered. I had to reload the page and restart it.

...Um, another data point. IF there's room on the screen so that the growl doesn't overlap any other window (rare for me, 17" CRT), then the stuttering effect is greatly reduced or even eliminated. It's at its worst when the growl touches / overlaps a window that's actually doing an animation. eg: The growl slightly overlapping QuickTime Player's window. On my Smurf, the video playback often actually stops during the fade in/out (depends on the codec in use). On my PB, the playback just becomes a bit jerky. But again - this happens with ANY window overlapping, not just a growl.

How difficult would it be to eliminate the fade effect? Can you easily crank out a test for us to try? No setting to be added, just make it snap the growl on/off the screen. I understand that you don't want to eliminate this pretty effect, but if it fixes the problemo... it might be worth at least a test. Please?

Thanks!
- Dan.

The_Tick wrote:How exactly is a 1 second fade distracting though?

Google sent me here exactly for that reason, the fading is too long (for me).

I usually try to read the notification as soon as it appears, but the transition effect when it appears doesn't let me, I have to wait for the transition to finish before I can read the message.

I work with many windows open and when the notifications appear, they cover some content, no matter where they are which is fine. The problem is waiting that extra second to get access to the content behind the notification.

A one second delay might not be much at first, but when it happens frequently, it makes me go and spend time looking for a solution. No transition for both the start and the end would be perfect for me, but maybe I could tolerate 1/3 or 1/4 of a second.

Don't take me wrong, I love Growl, I'll keep using it and I'm thankful for all the time you guys spent and still spend working on it, but that feature is a PITA for me.