Notifications
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Hello,
I have an application which runs in the background. Periodically, it should notify the user of some event. My client is motivated by the nice job Android did with the notification UI. I had thought about creating a widget on the homescreen but it looks like that was "deprecated":http://developer.qt.nokia.com/forums/viewthread/1044 . At this point, I wanted to step back and see if there was a way to do it via Qt. Is there some Qt functionality which would satisfy this mobile need?
-jk
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Hello,
do you mean you need a popup-like window?
Android's Notification is a bit more elegent.
Many programs run in the background. Periodically, they will need some way of notifying the user of something that is important. Maybe the user wants to track certain stock quotes and be notified if the stock exceeds some value. Maybe the user travels a lot and wants to be notified of light flights. Historically some of this has been done dealt with via SMS. However, programs running in the background are becoming more common and as such Google was inspired to create a notification UI on what is the moral equivalent of our home screen.
They use part of the status bar at the top of the screen. In this area, small icons are placed within a particular application has something to tell you. If you have mail you might see a mail icon there. To learn more about these notifications the user simply drags down the status bar revealing a list that details each notification. The user can take action by clicking on individual notifications. I think this is an elegant way of aggregating all the notifications on the device. The alternative is for each application to create its own unique way of presenting notifications to the user.
To to be clear: you want something that works on Symbian^3?
My current thinking is in the spirit of Qt. So, it should be cross platform but, yes, Symbian^3 is a target.
-jk
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I don't think there is a cross platform way of doing this. It is very much a platform dependent solution, and I think that if you want your application to be properly integrated in the platform it runs on, it should follow whatever way the platform is using.
On the surface, it sounds like Android is using something like a system tray (I don't have an Android device). This area too was meant for notifications of applications that had something to say, untill it became fashionable for each and every application to have an icon there even if there was nothing going on.
Perhaps you could scan to see if the "Qt Mobility API":http://doc.qt.nokia.com/qtmobility-1.1.0/index.html's offer this kind of integration, but I am not sure that that API will cover all the platforms you target, if such an API is there at all. Still, it could be a start if it is there, and perhaps might be expanded. You could also create your own abstraction for this, and create platform dependent implementations to make each of them fit the target platform.
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Hello Andre,
I am familiar with the Mobility APIs. I may have missed something but I do not think there is anything relevant in the published APIs.
However, Nokia released the "Push Notification API":http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/blog/nokia-developer-news/2010/12/08/push-notifications-and-long-battery-life-with-notifications-api-beta which address the above scenario from a power perspective. Seems to me there is a need for a UI for it.
-jk