Colibri

Various KDE 1.-4. Improvements

Source (link to git-repo or to original if based on someone elses unmodified work): Add the source-code for this project on opencode.net

39
8.4
Available as/for: -
Description:

What is it?
Colibri provides an alternative to KDE4 Plasma notifications.

Colibri notifications look lighter and are completely passive: they do not provide any buttons. You may or may not like this.

Since they are completely passive, they smoothly fade away when you mouse over them, allowing you to interact with any window behind them.

They also do not stack each others: if multiple notifications happen, they will be shown one at a time.

Dependencies

You need kdelibs >= 4.4.

Setup
Colibri can be configured from its System Settings module.
If you need help follow the setup howto at http://gitorious.org/colibri/pages/SetupHowto.

A bit of history

Passive notifications for Plasma first appeared as "Ayatana notifications", an alternative notification system I implemented in Kubuntu Karmic as part of my work for Canonical.

Ayatana notifications were implemented as a patch against the systemtray applet. Colibri is based on this work, but does not require patching any applet.

Colibri contains code I wrote for Canonical, but it is not a Canonical product.
Last changelog:

7 years ago

2013.05.14 - 0.3.0
Fixes
- Bring back drop shadows in KDE SC 4.10
- Use KMessageWidget in KCM
- Remove blank lines between concatenated notifications
- Moved to kde.org git repository

2011.09.25 - 0.2.2
Fixes
- Plug three small mem leaks. Should also fix a rare crasher. (Aurélien Gí¢teau)

Translations
- Brasilian Portuguese (Caio Romí£o)
- Slovakian (Slavko)
- Italian (Federico Chiacchiaretta)
- Czech (Pavel Fric)
- Spanish (gejo)

2010.08.06 - 0.2.1
Fixes
- Disable KWin shadows.
- Quit if we can't register as the notification handler.

2010.08.05 - 0.2.0
New features
- When a second notification arrives from the same application, using the same title, append it to the existing notification.
- Notifications use blurred background on KDE 4.5.
- Notifications use a background halo behind text, similar to what Plasma tooltips do since KDE 4.4, as well as the Plasma theme foreground color.
- Implemented support for the replacesId parameter.
- It is now possible to specify the screen where the notifications will appear.
- A "Preview" button has been added to the KCM.
- It is now possible to start Colibri from within the KCM.
- Turkish translation by Ozan í‡aÄŸlayan.
- German translation by Michael Gangolf.
- Serbian translation for desktop file by Mladen Pejaković.

Fixes
- KCM is now translatable.
- The KCM has moved (again!) to the notification group.
- Use an autostart file to start Colibri instead of relying on the DBus service
system. This solves file conflict problems with other notification systems and
ensures Colibri is started when the first KDE notification is sent.
- Fixed linking with gold.

2010.02.16 - 0.1.1
- Moved the KCM to the Desktop category.
- Emit the NotificationClosed() signal when a notification is closed. This fixes double notifications from Banshee.
- Implement the CloseNotification() method.

2009.12.15 - 0.1.0
- First release.

155 comments
Comments/Ratings

Please login or register to add a comment or rating

Montblanc

11 years ago

Colibri notifications are really beautiful, but I noticed a couple of misfunctions:

When Nepomuk displays the now indexing notification, I see them in a white box on the center of the screen. They're not where I specified them to be (on the upper-right), neither they are drawn by Plasma. It's just like a buttonless Qt notification.

The second one is a Firefox issue. Its notifications were replaced by Plasma notifications, but after installing Colibri, they're back to classic Firefox notifications.

I know it's not easy for you to create a notification system from scratch and make it better than the original one, but I've decided to put my trust in Colibri and I'll keep following your updates!

Report

C

bk12

11 years ago

About Nepomuk: this is probably because Nepomuk is started before Colibri. Not sure how to fix it.

About Firefox: this extension may help:
https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/9622
(I did not test it)

Report

Montblanc

11 years ago

About Nepomuk: we should be able to change the Colibri service priority on runlevel. Is this even possible?

About Firefox: Thank you. I downloaded that extension and hacked its compatibility against Firefox 3.6, but notifications simply disappeared. I don't know if it's due to the wrong extension compatibility or to dbus messages not being correctly interpreted by Colibri.

Report

Montblanc

11 years ago

About Nepomuk (AGAIN!): I made a small script that makes colibri start before KDE, and Nepomuk notifications are just GONE! Other notifications are fine, though.

Report

cyberbeat

11 years ago

Thanks for your work. I replaced my notifications with colibri and love these notifications much more!

Only problem was the install: I generated a RPM with CPACK, but that conflicted against another packacke because of the dbus-service-file. Is there a possible way (for packagers) to generate packages, that do not conflict with the present service-file?

By the way: I think developers on kde-apps should by default include CPACK-code like

SET(CPACK_PACKAGE_NAME ${CMAKE_PROJECT_NAME})
SET(CPACK_SET_DESTDIR TRUE)
INCLUDE(CPack)

into their CMakeLists.txt, and drop a few lines describing how easy to create a package after compiling, like "cpack -G RPM"

Report

C

bk12

11 years ago

The service file is a problematic indeed. You can rename it (dbus does not care about the name), but then you may end up with two implementations of the same service, and in this case dbus picks the first one it finds :/

I'll have a look at these CPack lines.

Report

pejakm

11 years ago

Internalization support (translations) would be nice to have.

Serbian translation strings for "colibri.desktop":


Quote:Name[sr]=Колибри обавештења
Name[sr@latin]=Kolibri obaveštenja

Comment[sr]=Подешавање Колибри обавештења
Comment[sr@latin]=Podešavanje Kolibri obaveštenja

Report

C

bk12

11 years ago

Thanks! I just integrated them.

Report

marvinf

11 years ago

as the name already implies - IMO the kcm module should be placed into the notifications category. what do you think?

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9

Schiwi

11 years ago

this is a good idea i think

Report

treris

11 years ago

First of all I'm glad to have the ayatana notifications back now that I'm in kde 4.4. Unfortunately though it seems that some notifications are displayed twice.

For instance when Banshee changes songs it displays the title of the new song twice in a row.

Kinda weird

Report

C

bk12

11 years ago

Thanks for the report. It is now fixed in Git and will be in next release.

Report

buu700

11 years ago

Thanks a lot for this! The KCM doesn't appear in System Settings for me though :(. I'm running Kubuntu 9.10 amd64. Which text file should I edit to configure Colibri manually? Thanks.

Report

C

bk12

11 years ago

That's weird. Anyway, the config file is .kde/share/config/colibrirc

For now it looks like this:

[General]
Alignment=68

Where 68 is the OR of the various Qt::Alignment flags:

Qt::AlignLeft 1
Qt::AlignRight 2
Qt::AlignHCenter 4

Qt::AlignTop 32
Qt::AlignBottom 64
Qt::AlignVCenter 128

Report

Montblanc

11 years ago

I can confirm that the KCM does not appear into System Settings on Kubuntu 9.10 i386, but I can call it through `kcmshell4 colibri`.

I'll keep following your updates, Colibri rocks my desktop! ;)

Report

Montblanc

11 years ago

I'm sorry, I spoke too soon!
I was expecting it to appear under "Appearance", but it was under "Desktop". So there's no problem with the KCM in my case! ;)

Report

buu700

11 years ago

Awesome, thank you so much! Actually though, in the time between my question and your response, I actually got used to the default top-right configuration (as opposed to my bottom-right with Ayatana in KDE 4.3); heh, go figure :P.

Report

RazZziel

11 years ago

Notifications don't stack by design or is it going to be fixed? Are patches wanted, or being worked in?

Myself, I find the current behavior very clumsy and unpleasant, at least it should be configurable, IMHO (just a "stack/serialize" checkbox in systemsettings->Appearance->Colibri notifications).

Report

C

bk12

11 years ago

I have no plan to add support for stacking notifications at the moment, but I am ready to review interesting patches :)

Report

acidrums4

9 years ago

I want that feature too! Seems that you have abandoned developing Colibri :(

Report

FSchulz

11 years ago

I think stacking would be nice... Something like this looks good

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Po4qdoqKJOs

Best regards!

Report

evilkastel

11 years ago

I'm a believer.Latency is a little high, tough.about 2 seconds. MOre real time notiifications would be awesome. Also, i had to add colibri to Startup so it works. great work!

Report

KDesk

11 years ago

Hi, can you provide a binary deb package for Colibri?

Report

C

bk12

11 years ago

Unfortunately, I am not a packager. Maybe someone out there can create debs?

Report

Rasi

11 years ago

can you make notifications autoupdate, if the same event gets modified often?

in my example its a volume change in mpd, that i send with notify-send. colibri shows queued notifications for every X step of the change, which can easily take a minute :) would be nice to see the live volume change inside of one notification.

Report

7 years ago

2013.05.14 - 0.3.0
Fixes
- Bring back drop shadows in KDE SC 4.10
- Use KMessageWidget in KCM
- Remove blank lines between concatenated notifications
- Moved to kde.org git repository

2011.09.25 - 0.2.2
Fixes
- Plug three small mem leaks. Should also fix a rare crasher. (Aurélien Gí¢teau)

Translations
- Brasilian Portuguese (Caio Romí£o)
- Slovakian (Slavko)
- Italian (Federico Chiacchiaretta)
- Czech (Pavel Fric)
- Spanish (gejo)

2010.08.06 - 0.2.1
Fixes
- Disable KWin shadows.
- Quit if we can't register as the notification handler.

2010.08.05 - 0.2.0
New features
- When a second notification arrives from the same application, using the same title, append it to the existing notification.
- Notifications use blurred background on KDE 4.5.
- Notifications use a background halo behind text, similar to what Plasma tooltips do since KDE 4.4, as well as the Plasma theme foreground color.
- Implemented support for the replacesId parameter.
- It is now possible to specify the screen where the notifications will appear.
- A "Preview" button has been added to the KCM.
- It is now possible to start Colibri from within the KCM.
- Turkish translation by Ozan í‡aÄŸlayan.
- German translation by Michael Gangolf.
- Serbian translation for desktop file by Mladen Pejaković.

Fixes
- KCM is now translatable.
- The KCM has moved (again!) to the notification group.
- Use an autostart file to start Colibri instead of relying on the DBus service
system. This solves file conflict problems with other notification systems and
ensures Colibri is started when the first KDE notification is sent.
- Fixed linking with gold.

2010.02.16 - 0.1.1
- Moved the KCM to the Desktop category.
- Emit the NotificationClosed() signal when a notification is closed. This fixes double notifications from Banshee.
- Implement the CloseNotification() method.

2009.12.15 - 0.1.0
- First release.

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