Notification Area issues

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uwestoehr
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Notification Area issues

Post by uwestoehr »

The new Notification Area features has some issues:

- it grabs the clipboard of any open program. For exampe, when I copy text in a program e.g. the web browser, I get a notification popup despite FreeCAD's main window is not active:
Xko1KsrDzk.png
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FreeCAD should not popup for for something that did not happen in FreeCAD

- I get a warning on every usage of Ctrl+C:

- I get a notification for every warning. This is bad because one of the main complaints in the past was that FreeCAD users were by default bothered with many messages they don't understand. In the past the default was that the report view panel popped up on ever warning. But FreeCAD issues so many and often even I could not explain my colleagues what a warning was about. Since we changed the default that warnings do no trigger the report view panel top open, only errors, the situation is much better.
Therefore the default should stay that warnings trigger no notifications. Experienced users could set an option to enable to get a notification popup also for warnings.

@abdullah, can you please have a look?

thanks and regards Uwe
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Re: Notification Area issues

Post by Syres »

Glad I saw this, I was starting to look for a Linux Mint update causing all sorts of graphics 'left behind' from other apps as well as sub windows going behind FC and having to move windows around my desktop in order to retrieve them.
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Re: Notification Area issues

Post by wmayer »

This is not a problem of the notification area per-se but rather a Qt issue because it reports many warnings that for the end user are not relevant. With the implemented message handler all Qt warnings or errors are redirected to FreeCAD.

The solution of this issue must be to define some filter rules so that they won't be shown to the end user any more. Qt provides the class QLoggingCategory that should be used for this purpose. Here some further information of how to use it:
https://zren.github.io/2020/06/19/qml-c ... in-qt-5151
https://forum.qt.io/topic/126268/qloggi ... ault-rules
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Re: Notification Area issues

Post by wmayer »

abdullah
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Re: Notification Area issues

Post by abdullah »

I think it is good you open this topic.

I have not experienced myself these issues. Of course they are not intended.

I have merged Werner's PR with the filter. Let us know if this fixes all issues or only some issues.

Warnings and Errors that are reported should be about FreeCAD. Here, if FreeCAD is too chatty we will have to look into each case.
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uwestoehr
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Re: Notification Area issues

Post by uwestoehr »

wmayer wrote: Thu Mar 16, 2023 12:17 pm This is not a problem of the notification area per-se but rather a Qt issue because it reports many warnings that for the end user are not relevant.
This is one part, but FreeCAD itself also issues a lot of warnings not relevant for newbies. Therefore the default setting should be as we have it in FC 0.20: warnings are not pop up. Experiences users can enable an option the preferences to show them.
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Re: Notification Area issues

Post by uwestoehr »

Many thanks. This fixes the issue with warnings by copying something to the clipboard.
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uwestoehr
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Re: Notification Area issues

Post by uwestoehr »

abdullah wrote: Thu Mar 16, 2023 7:46 pm Warnings and Errors that are reported should be about FreeCAD. Here, if FreeCAD is too chatty we will have to look into each case.
This is what I want to avoid. Users are bothered with messages like "the references are out of scope". We invest a lot of spare time to FreeCAD and sorting out all warnings FC might output cost too much time. (I speak here for myself of course too). In the past the devs did not thought about average users all the time, thus there are a lot or warnings. Their message text is sometimes not clear and, more important for the user, often one can ignore them. But how can you know as user?

As we had this debate already and I don't understand why we reopen this again, especially since FC 0.20 is out since a while and we got no negative feedback to not to present warnings to users by default.
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Re: Notification Area issues

Post by chrisb »

uwestoehr wrote: Thu Mar 16, 2023 8:34 pm This is what I want to avoid. Users are bothered with messages like "the references are out of scope".
That's a very good example; but the conclusion is the opposite: This is a warning which should by all means be respected. Ignoring it leads to bad models.
It's not the experts who need the warnings, it's the newbies. From a user's point of view is Abdullah's way the right one, if things should improve. If it is wanted, we can probably list some warnings which occur frequently, and should be checked.
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uwestoehr
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Re: Notification Area issues

Post by uwestoehr »

Concerning the feature itself:

For example when I make a typical mistake like selecting 2 lines in sketcher and press the radius constraint button.
In FC 0.20 I get this prominent info that I made a mistake and what I should do.
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In master I get this:
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So the info is hidden at the bottom (not prominent) and even outside of FreeCAD's main window. For me it appears in the Windows task bar and therefore it took me a while to realizes that this is a message from FreeCAD.

Also, there is now less info: I get a message what to select, but not why. So it is not clear that I got the message because I made a selection mistake. The icon in the notifier says it is an info, but this is not just a hint. The action could not be performed because of a mistake of the user, so it is an error.

Then people might be annoyed by the popups and turn of the notification. Then they don't get any info at all about the mistake.

I hope you don't beat me for this: but the mistake notification in FC 0.20 is better. You get an error dialog you need to click OK. This assures the message is read and the user gets the info. It is prominently visible and always inside the main windows of FC.
Can we therefore please bring this back? I mean, the notification area is cool and should stay, but we should keep informing the user about his mistakes as we did. So even when the user turned off the notification, he must get an error dialog.
So be default we should keep the error dialog. Experienced users can turn them off and use only notifications. For the notifications, they should be changed to contain all info, as in my example the info why this message occurred.
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