1 post tagged “hci”
Over the past few months, I've been immersing myself in the ubiquitous computing literature with a focus on context, notifications, and interruptions. Over the past month, I've been looking at ways that I could apply some of the theoretical academic research to real world environments and scenarios. Lately, I've been learning the Growl notification framework from both the perspective of an end-user developer with an application that emits notifications and that of the interface designer who is responsible for crafting an aesthetically pleasing and informative display for those notifications. Earlier this spring, when I discovered Twitterrific, I was impressed at how its use of sound was a pleasant addition to my environment.
One of the things that frustrated me about the Growl system was that there didn't seem to be any systematic approach to combining audio and visual notifications on the basis of the emitting notification. For one thing, plugin developers seemed more interested in creating interesting visual displays than exploring other output modalities. There is a speech plugin that uses MacOS X's built-in speech synthesizer, but that was it. To scratch my particular itch, I decided to create a plugin of my own.
I also included a feature where rules may specify that the visual notification is to be suppressed. This has proven to be useful with my use of NetNewsWire. NetNewsWire does not include any sound effects of its own, but does emit Growl notifications. By associating a sound effect with the "Feed Updated" notification, I now hear "tinks" when new news is available. Likewise, I can suppress the sound effects for notifications where that would be a problem. I did exactly that with the iTunes notifications. I receive a nice visual indicator with an album cover and song title when a new track plays, but no sound effect interrupts the music.
Adding new sounds to the system is simple. Copying an AIFF file to the standard sound locations (Library/Sounds) will make that sound available the next time you configure the plugin. I've found a number of interesting effects to customize my environment at The FreeSound Project.
Technically, this plugin is a modest extension to Walton's already stellar Smoke plugin. However, I've been discovering novel ways in which it can be used to create a more pleasant ambient environment. I don't know how I lived without it and hope that others feel the same. I've posted it online as part of my context and notification project, and it can be downloaded from Google Code. If you do give it a spin and have some feedback, I'd be glad to hear it.
