Posts Tagged ‘instant messaging’
Ignore notifications from (in general) instant messaging agents while you are engaged in an uninterruptable job on a computer
Have you been reading or writing something important and while doing so to be interrupted by a pop-up message or flashing area on the screen informing you about a new message (in general: event) on a group chat where you are in (skype) and/or a new message in an IRC channel (mIRC and even other chat clients). When you are doing something important on your PC you should be sure that there will not appear any kind of interruption. And because you can’t lock the all kinds of events while you are working on your main task, and maybe it is important to be in touch about some very important events (i.e. private message from someone, this event is addressed just to you, not to a crowd). You should decide for every application (and any application should enable it to the user) that do you want to receive events by the general way, or just for a period of time to receive event though a quieter way.
Back to the example in Skype and mIRC. Imagine you are doing something important and on the same time the group chat with all your classmates/colleagues gets really active and every time when you close the chat window you see a pop-up about a new message and a new window is opened and starts flashing. Skype should provide you with the ability to ignore events from a list of group chats and/or even people (other useful feature is to deny any group chat and people and enable a list of group chats and/or people who are not obeying the last rule), now Skype software lets you to say that you are not reachable and ignore any event from the Skype network. If you use Skype for many purposes you have to be free to choose which events and from who are interesting to you at some time.
I find this useful in Skype, mIRC and the rest services which present events, especially in chat/ conversation ones.
Possible implementaions
- Adding a button “ignore <name> for a moment” which stops presenting events of any kind while it is not pressed again (the next time the button is named “stop ignoring <name>”).
- Addig a main button “ignore all event for a moment” which stops presenting events of any kind while it is not pressed again (the next time the button is named “stop ignoring all”). Adding a new button connected with the last one to every place where it is able to be received and then presented event which button is named “enable presenting events from here” and it makes the same as it is named. Of course when you press once ignore all and then a list of enabling buttons for a concrete sources the time when you press stop ignoring all the system should have an politic (shared with the user) about the enable this activated buttons about the next time when ignore all is activated.
- It is useful to capture the moment of time when a user is using the PC and is ignoring some events, without declaring its ignoring state to the application. This time the application should stop warning and present a quiet (small and not flashing) sign about the occurred new event(s).
