[Idea] Notifications handler plugin (1 Viewer)

[bodiroga]

Hi guys!

I know that you are currently working really hard on making MP 2 as stable as possible before the first alpha version is released, but well, simply making future proposals is not so bad, is it?

Have you ever think on adding to MP 2 structure a centralized notification system for plugins? When I think in a futurist HTPC software it comes to my mind a program that interacts a lot with the user, and for that the user should know in any moment what is its computer doing in a centralized and well structured form. Let's take MP1 as an example for what I'm talking about. In MP1 we have lots of default and 3rd party plugins that display information to the user: infoservice for news and twitter updates, fanarthandler for recently added music, tvseries, movies,..., trakt plugin (and I suppose that in the future follw.it will also support it) for what your friends are seeing, trakt plugin for a tvseries calendar, google calendar plugin for event and notifications alerts, email plugin for new emails arrival, schedules windows to see what TVServer is going to record next...

But why are all this notifications spread in different windows for each plugin? Why don't we make a notification window and let the plugins put there the information they want in a centralized why? Think of it as Android or, now, Apple (always innovating...) do with their notification bars. Of course we should also discuss about how the user should access to this windows (link in homescreen, link in a contextual menu in every windows...), but first I prefer to hear what do you think about the idea. We can even use this window to announce updates for Mediaportal, plugins,... (similar to what Extensions plugin does now for MP1). There are many possibilities.

Yeah, Albert, I suppose that this can be implemented with a 3rd party plugin, you always tell me the same But what's your personal opinion? How difficult is to implement something like this (making it as flexible as possible)? Any advantage of having this integrated into the program core instead of developing a plugin?

Any other suggestions? Comments?

Many thanks for all your comments and sorry for mi level of English, I do my best so you can understand me.

Best regards,

Aitor

 

[Albert]

AW: [Idea] Notifications handler plugin

I don't have so much time at the moment, so I only have a very short answer. We already have a notification service in MP2 (called INotificationService). That service provides a common interface for plugins to send their notifications to. The UI base plugin has a notification model which exposes several properties of the notifications to the UI, which can show the notifications to the user, so the notification handling is completely skinnable. Perhaps you should look at that infrastructure!

 

[PhilosopherKing]

Hello,

I need to study the INotificationService interface, but I had a quick question. Is this service accessible from outside? That is, could, say, Growl for Windows or other programs forward notifications to the service?

Thanks

 

[Albert]

AW: [Idea] Notifications handler plugin

Hi PhilosopherKing,
the INotificationService is a C#-Interface and the corresponding service instance can be received by calling ServiceRegistration.Get<INotificationService>(). The service is not exposed to the "outer world". But it is not difficult to write a plugin which adds a new UPnP "notification service" to the MP2 UPnP device which can be contacted from other programs via UPnP and which forwards the UPnP calls to the MP2 notification service.

Or it is possible to write a plugin which adds a webservice interface for the notification service, for example.