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Rofication

Rofication is a minimalistic notification system. It is loosely modeled after notification centers on Android and Windows 10. The main idea is to not annoy (e.g. overlap parts of my desktop) but still keep a persistent list of messages. Notifications are useful, however too many notifications showing up too often (e.g. work mail popups) distract from the current task and are therefore dismissed without proper reviewing. The goal is to show (in a single clear place) there are notifications but not pop them up. It is up to the user to review the notifications when time is available. If things are critical one should use a more direct media (e.g. face to face or phone).

To summarize Rofications, it has:

  • 1 point to see if there are notifications. For example the status bar of your Desktop Environment. Notification Bar
  • An application to (re)view all open notifications. Notification Bar
  • Persistent notifications, they stay around until dismissed. They should stick around, even over reboots.

Techniques used

Rofication implements a notification daemon following the Galago Desktop Notification standard. This is used by most Linux desktop environments and most relevant applications support this. It is easily scriptable using notify-send. Rofication aims to be a drop-in replacement for existing notification daemons.

Rofication tries to re-use existing code as much as possible. It uses Rofi for displaying, i3blocks for the unintrusive notification and Python for d-bus implementation of notification daemon.

Structure

The main structure is like depicted below. The daemon acts as a storage point for the dbus messages generated by the applications. The unix-socket interface allows clients to query the storage. A proper protocol still has to be defined.

┌─────────────┐           ┌───────────────────┐                      ┌────────────────┐
│ application │ --dbus--> │ rofication-daemon │ <--- unix-socket --> │ rofication-gui │
└─────────────┘           └───────────────────┘       │              └────────────────┘
                                |                     │             ┌──────────────────────────┐
                                |                     \-----------> │ rofication-statusi3blocks│
                            <hdd:json-db>                           └──────────────────────────┘

The components consist of:

Daemon

Rofication daemon is a small Python script that listens for notification messages on the local dbus. Notifications are internally queued (and preserved) and can be viewed by a client via a unix-socket. It is just a simple storage for notifications.

Notification

Rofication does not implement its own 'widget' to display notifications. Instead it can be easily integrated into existing tools. Currently we ship a small script to integrate into i3-blocks. This shows the number of notifications and signals when there are critical notifications. Ideally there should be several small scripts that implement this for different desktop environments.

GUI

The Rofication GUI consists of a small Python script wrapping Rofi. The GUI allows the user to view notifications, mark them as seen and dismiss them.

CLI

This still needs to be written