Evolution Alarm Notifier - 2.6 plan

Main Points

• Some parts of the alarm notifier code needs to be thread safe. This has been a cause for some random Evolution-alarm notifier crashes. Evo-2.6 must have crash free EAN.

• The GUI for the notifier is quite disturbing for the user (see Calendar UI changes in Evolution/UI2.6) and needs to be more refined. There must be a small notification at a corner of the desktop that stays for 30 seconds (if unattended) and there must be an indication on the panel after this to show that there has been an alarm notification. At any later point of time, if the user wishes to know the details, they should be obtained by a click on the Alarm Indicator on the panel (on both GNOME and KDE) .

• Additionally there must be an option provided to user (either on clicking the notification window or the New Alarm Indicator)that enables him/her to know the outstanding alarms for the day.

Discussion

• There are scenarios where in few alarms might be missed by the user such as when the computer goes to hibernation/sleep mode or when the alarm notifier process is alive over a day (midnight check is done, but it still checks only every half-an-hour). In such scenarios, user must be provided an indication and/or option to know if any alarm notifications are missed.
• Instead of having midnight check every half-an-hour, shouldn't there be a way to wait on a signal that might be emitted by system clock on the event of arrival of a new day ?
• Tighter integration of Alarm on Panel, where in there could be an applet that runs all the time, with menus and submenus to do various stuff such as enabling and disabling alarms globally/calendarwise.
• Can we integrate alarm with SMS gateway and send meeting alarms through SMS

Alarm/Run a Program needs to have macros so you can paste portions of the Appointment reminder as args to the program. i.e.: echo %DESCRIPTION | mailx -s %SUMMARY some.email@address.com Need to have a way to store a command line such as the above and set it as a default. A user sending reminders to a pager, for example, shouldn't have to re-enter the command line every time.

Desktop wide API for Alarm Notification

• Since there already exists a framework for the daemon and the alarm notification. It should be possible to expose api's which are desktop wise, for eg Create an alarm from Tomboy(evolution-sharp??) or stick notes. This would require a generic api which all applications can use to schedule alarms. Its also a good point to consider whether the alarm-daemon would just emit signal or handle the alarm display itself.