Non-intrusive notifications in Canvas

[irgolic]

Orange version

3.17.0

Expected behavior

Pop-up windows are aggressive, bringing immediate attention to themselves, disabling the program until the user responds to them. Available update notifications are currently delivered this way once per day if the user is not running the latest version of Orange.

Implementing a non-intrusive notifications system is integral to communicating news to the user in a friendly way.

An example of such a system is that of Jetbrains programs (PyCharm, CLion ...), appearing in the bottom-right corner of the program:

In addition to new updates, such a system could deliver notifications about:

• requesting permission to track usage statistics,
• Orange in media,
• blog posts.

Notifications of secondary importance should include a 'never show again' option.

A publicly hosted notification feed should consist of small JSON objects containing the following information:

• publish date/expiry date,
• notification type (critical, blog, ...),
• title,
• message, able to include hyperlink,
• when it should appear (wait time after application start).

A preferences pane should be added, allowing the user to enable/disable different types of notifications.

What are the use cases for this? Are there many different types of notifications we would want to display? If not, notification types could be generalized into only critical and trivial.

[markotoplak]

I like the idea of showing notifications in a way that replaces pop-ups. The idea of having publicly publicly available feed also seems fine.

It seemed that you had notifications on the workflow window in mind, but perhaps the same kind of interface could also be used for widget windows. There, we could use it to report on errors and warnings (without the public feed, of course). I opened an issue for that: #3377

[janezd]

I agree. I wouldn't put this at the top priority, but it would be nice to have.

If you could implement it so that (some GUI) code can be reused in #3377, it would be even better. I think #3377 is even more important than this.

[ajdapretnar]

@janezd This can be closed, no?

[janezd]

@irgolic commented #3855 as "The first of (likely) three pull requests implementing #3372"

[janezd]

Closed via #3933.