Ruby and Ubuntu's Notify-OSD

Question

I'm using ruby-libnotify in a Ruby GTK app, and it works great to create a bubble popup in Ubuntu. I'm on Hardy, and it all works great. Then I had others try the app on Jaunty, and instead of a bubble popup with the new Notify-OSD system, as I expected, the notification turned into a dialog box.

I looked into it, and found the Ubuntu wiki states that the problem is because I set a timeout of 0:

Some programs specify an expire_timeout of 0 to produce notifications that never close by themselves, assuming that they can be closed manually as they can in notification-daemon. Because this is usually done for a message that requires response or acknowledgement, Notify OSD presents it as an alert box rather than as a bubble.

Is there a way I can use libnotify in some way to have a normal bubble with a "never expire" timeout? I would actually prefer it if I could use the old notification system, even, since Notify-OSD doesn't seem to support permanent bubbles at all.

It is unacceptable to have the dialog for me, as it doesn't stay over all windows, so the user won't see the popup right away, necessarily (which is the whole point of using the bubble popup).

Answer 1

Sort of a sideways answer, but perhaps if the notification API doesn't quite map onto what you want to do you should look into using a more general library that allows you to draw your own on-screen bubbles. xosd comes to mind, though I remember it to be quite limited, but perhaps there are other options...

Answer 2

I remember using some command line tool to display notifications. You could just call it using system or ``.

Answer 3

It looks like you are just trying to use Notify-OSD for something it was not designed for. Notify-OSD bubbles are informational and transient, meaning that no critical information should be put in them as they are made to be ignorable.

According to the Ubuntu Design Guidelines, it looks like you are trying to make a morphing alert box, which should suit your needs nicely.