Hide the badge if number too big
Needs RevisionPublic

Authored by svuorela on Nov 25 2018, 11:16 AM.

Details

Reviewers
hein
broulik
ngraham
Group Reviewers
Plasma
VDG
Summary

A 9999+ badge on the email conveys no actual information that the user
isn't already aware of, and it just makes the UI look bulky.

Test Plan

Copied in the files in an existing install, and my email icon now looks normal

Diff Detail

Repository
R119 Plasma Desktop
Branch
master
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No Linters Available
Unit
No Unit Test Coverage
Build Status
Buildable 5354
Build 5372: arc lint + arc unit
svuorela created this revision.Nov 25 2018, 11:16 AM
Restricted Application added a project: Plasma. · View Herald TranscriptNov 25 2018, 11:16 AM
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svuorela requested review of this revision.Nov 25 2018, 11:16 AM
ngraham requested changes to this revision.Nov 25 2018, 3:02 PM
ngraham added a reviewer: VDG.
ngraham added a subscriber: ngraham.

Hmm, I get that "9999+" may not be useful, but not showing any badge at all is misleading; too many notifications != no notifications at all.

Maybe we could come up with a better number or text here?

This revision now requires changes to proceed.Nov 25 2018, 3:02 PM

Maybe just show an asterisk instead?

Or an infinity symbol? 😛

ndavis added a subscriber: ndavis.EditedNov 25 2018, 5:40 PM

Why not abbreviate the number? Instead of using "9,999+" for 11000, use "11K".

@ngraham It might be that many notifications != no notifications in some cases, but at least in the case of emails, with many unread emails basically doesn't make a difference.

I have a coulpe of hundred thousand unread emails + the emails in my spamfolder which is another hundred thousand. Having such an indicator in this case is just .. useless.

I do get that the badge makes sense if you have a inbox zero kind of attendance to your email, but if not, it is just noise.

Maybe a star or a infinity symbol can be a usable compromise. But that also doesn't actually convey any information. Because you know you have unread emails.

I have a couple of hundred thousand unread emails + the emails in my spamfolder which is another hundred thousand. Having such an indicator in this case is just .. useless.

This sounds like a bug in the email client to me. Including spam messages in the "unread count" for the purpose of badging the icon makes no sense. What email client are you using?

Why not abbreviate the number? Instead of using "9,999+" for 11000, use "11K".

I like the idea, 10K+, 11K+, (badgeRect.number / 1000)

+1 from me too for 9k+, 10k+, 11k+, etc

@ngraham I use kmail ... but I have hundreds of thousands unread emails without counting my spam folders. (commit lists, bug lists, ...)

@anthonyfieroni I think that doesn't convey any actual information. "You have a lot of unread emails and doesn't use the count for anything specific".

And +11K is not that many fewer characters than +9999. It is all too bulky and noisy

I'll try a bit with a single character badge and see if that feels as noisy as +9999

is just with a +
is around current code
is this proposal

I'll try with + for a couple of days.

So i like second one, it can still be fixed to 10K+ because it does not matter above.

So i like second one, it can still be fixed to 10K+ because it does not matter above.

I'm still unsure what I as a user should use the number for ? It is not like I'm going to sit down and do anything to get the number down.

So i like second one, it can still be fixed to 10K+ because it does not matter above.

I'm still unsure what I as a user should use the number for ? It is not like I'm going to sit down and do anything to get the number down.

I feel like this patch trying to work around a problem in either your workflow or your email client. Notifications need to be sparse enough to be useful or else they're just distracting noise. It sounds like KMail should only include unread emails in your inbox, or have an option to do this (or if it does, you should use it, and it should probably be the default). Including millions of unread emails in your spam box and mailing list folders does not seem like a useful behavior.

In other words, if the badge ever actually reaches more than 9999 notifications, something is probably wrong in the client. Simply removing the badge in this case doesn't seem like the right approach. Because if we accept the premise that too many notifications should suppress the badge, is 9999 really the best threshold? Maybe 1000 would be better? Or even just 500? 300? 250? How many unread emails is so many that the notification badge isn't useful anymore?

Does this make any sense?

I feel like this patch trying to work around a problem in either your workflow

Is plasma seriously going to try to dictate my email workflow?

Maybe 1000 would be better? Or even just 500? 300? 250? How many unread emails is so many that the notification badge isn't useful anymore?

around a couple of hundred would be preferred. But I'm not now trying to fix that. Just the extreme case. The limit between "normal" and "extreme" is currently apparantly defined to 9999. I haven't proposed changing that.

But the reason I'm suggesting this patch here and not to kmail is in the kmail patch to acutally implement it.
@broulik writes something along the lines of "we dont need to cap it in kmail. we cap it in the plasma visualization" ( https://phabricator.kde.org/D9841 )

I feel like this patch trying to work around a problem in either your workflow

Is plasma seriously going to try to dictate my email workflow?

What I'm saying is that I think it makes more sense to communicate your preferred email workflow to KMail rather then to Plasma. I'm open to being convinced out of this point of view, of course. :)

What I'm saying is that I think it makes more sense to communicate your preferred email workflow to KMail rather then to Plasma. I'm open to being convinced out of this point of view, of course. :)

Did you read the comments on the kmail patch?

"this patch does not make any assumption on the representation. It will just say "I have this number 12345" and then the view (e.g. Task Manager in Plasma) can make sure it doesn't get super tiny,"

so if @broulik is representing the spec properly, then this should be fixed in plasma.

Oh. and I_recently cleaned up my main inbox a bit. it went from 10k unread emails to 5k. But these numbers are still useless for notifications.

I did. My proposal is something a bit different: an option to have KMail only look at the inbox for the purpose of determining the unread count to report to Plasma. I do see how this would be only marginally useful for you if you have 5,000 unread emails in your inbox though.

Another data point: in macOS, whether or not to show a numeric badge on the icon is something you can configure on a per-app basis. So for people whose email workflows result in very large unread counts, they can just turn off the badge in the global notification options for their email client.

Something like that might be nice here too.

FWIW after talking to some KMail developers in the Plasma IRC channel, we came up with a few bug reports that might help you:

Let's try poke @mlaurent and see if he has any comments.

I still think it is mostly a visualization issue. the mail client just tells what it knows.