After much bikeshedding, I delved in Specto’s code for a few hours this morning to get it working with Ubuntu 9.04’s controversial notification system daemon. The ability to set notification durations is now gone, and Specto only displays actions in the notifications if they are “allowed”. This should not impact users of vanilla libnotify. If people complain, it’s all Ubuntu’s fault now 🙂
specto-and-ubuntus-notify-osd
As you may have noticed, I have made some subtle changes to the actual contents of the notifications. The notification summary is now a proper summary with the watch name instead of “Specto”, and this means we put less “redundant stuff” in the actual “long description”.
Overall, this whole “conform to notify-osd” issue had a positive side-effect: it kicked my ass into actually doing the content cleanup I had on the back of my mind for quite some time.
specto-and-ubuntus-notify-osd-error
When the notifications are not attached to the tray icon anymore, messages like this one become glaringly wrong: their uselessness becomes quite apparent. I therefore filed bug 221.
All these changes are currently available for testing in my personal Specto branch. Translators will need to update some strings (mainly just remove obsolete stuff), so please send your updated translations for them to be included in Specto 0.3 final.


Comments

7 responses to “Notify-OSD compliance1 min read

  1. Since the notifications are not attached to the tray icon anymore i think that Specto
    must figure somewhere in the bubble !
    I had proposed once :
    “why not something like :
    “Name of the watch” has changed
    Specto reports that this watch has changed (by 8,2%)
    or “Name of the watch”
    Specto reports that this watch has changed (by 8,2%)”

  2. Yeah, that’s basically what was implemented 🙂

  3. excellent job with that version, congratulation !
    i guess the final version is not far away..?

  4. Karen Avatar
    Karen

    Howdy guys (and gals), I went looking for a program to do this and found this product. How many products like this are there? I want to use one for my own productivity (sales assistant of sorts) and want to keep my team updated on client changes so this product sounds right up my alley but would it make better sense to find a finished product or can I help by using the service? I have some specific terms I want to monitor on a specific page of our clients to see when something is added or removed but don’t need some terms. Does this make sense? What do you recommend?

  5. I’m not sure to understand. Have you tried Specto? Do you know that it is free and open source software designed for Linux? Just making that clear. It will not run on Windows (unless someone does the job of porting it).
    Specto is the only application to monitor static websites (in contrast to a syndication feed reader) that I know of, but there surely are other applications in this world that do this in some way, I have no idea.
    “Make better sense to find a finished product”? That doesn’t quite make sense in the software world, software (especially open source software) evolves constantly, unless the project is abandoned. If by that you meant a “stable and tested” product, then yes, Specto (the 0.3 version) is reliable enough for daily use (I have been using Specto and considering it “ready” for over two years).
    The list of known bugs and limitations can be seen in on http://code.google.com/p/specto/issues/list?can=2&q=-status%3Anew
    If you have ideas of features to add that fit the vision of the project, or bugs that you encounter, you are welcome to create issue reports on that project page.
    I hope this helps, your comment seemed very vague to me and I could not really figure out how to answer exactly.
    In any case, I would suggest that you visit the official Specto website (http://specto.sf.net) if you have not done so already.

  6. Hey there.
    Specto is looking very promising, especially when the integration with Notify-OSD is implemented. When do you think the release with that included will be available?
    Thanks!

  7. Thanks. I’m planning to try to kick myself to do a release in the coming weeks, but I lack time (even if it’s really not something complicated)/motivation and I keep finding new bugs. So ideally “soon”, but really, I cannot promise anything at this point. Don’t take my word on it 🙂