Notifications

[austincondiff]

How will notifications be handled in our app? There are two types of notifications - project-level issues and system-level notifications.

Project-level issues

These might be things like:

• Linter errors
• Invalid syntax
• Bad imports
• Missing dependencies

I think the issues navigator is where these project-level issues go. But they should be limited in scope to the project itself.

System-level notifications

These might be things like:

• An update is available. Restart to update.
• Update was recently installed. See release notes
• Update has failed
• Extension failed to update
• Extension failed to activate

The big question is how will we handle displaying system-level notifications? Where and how will they be displayed? We could either have our own notification system that overlays these notifications on the UI like VS Code does OR we could use Notification Center to display these on an OS level. Thoughts?

[Southpaw1496]

I definitely think they should be in the notification centre, it feels more native to me.

[lukepistrol]

I think that CodeEdit specific notifications should live in the notification center. If we include project specific notifications like warnings, errors, … it will get crowded very fast.

[austincondiff]

@thecoolwinter brought up a concern if people do not give our app permission to notification center. Do you see that as a concern? I personally feel like this feels more "native" to go this route but I also think about other apps and what kinds of notifications they put in notification center.

For example:
Adobe Creative Cloud notifies of application updates
Xcode notifies of successful builds.

This considered, I assume this would be appropriate usage of notification center.

[thecoolwinter]

To clarify a little, some notifications (especially for things like build completion) I agree with. But I don't think notifications are the way to go for things like updates or errors. I give maybe 3 apps permission to send notifications on my Mac and for things like errors I'd much rather get an alert when I open the app.

[austincondiff]

All good points. We should be using Notification Center as a supplement and not the only means whereby users can take action at the app-level. Let’s refer to the HIG here.

Avoid sending a notification that tells people to perform specific tasks within your app. If it makes sense to enable simple tasks that people can perform without opening your app, you can provide notification actions.

Use an alert — not a notification — to display an error message. People are familiar with both alerts and notifications, so you don’t want to cause confusion by using the wrong component. For guidance, see Alerts.

Handle notifications gracefully when your app is in the foreground. Your app’s notifications don’t appear onscreen when your app is in the front, but your app still receives the information.

It sounds like based on this that notifications should only appear if the app is inactive and the user wasn’t there to see an event.

For example, Xcode notifies on build success or failure. When the app is active it displays a HUD to indicate build success or failure. When it is inactive, it sends the user a notification. I am not convinced that we need to respond in a similar manor. Some notifications are not deserving of an alert it sounds like Apple leaves it up to developers in how they want to handle in-app notification unless there is more in the HIG around this.