Comments on: Humanized Messages Library

By: trent

trent — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 15:28:04 +0000

jQuery Impromptu is good for customized alerts, prompts and dialogs:
http://trentrichardson.com/Impromptu/

By: mhw

mhw — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 16:24:00 +0000

I hacked together a prototype version of this, if anyone cares :). Nice work by Michael Heilemann practically demanded flattery via imitation!

http://blog.hypomodern.com/2007/10/19/humane-transparent-messaging

By: Phil M

Phil M — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 14:07:13 +0000

Demo page doesn’t work in IE6

By: Dominic GrÃ¤fen

Dominic GrÃ¤fen — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 04:47:06 +0000

I tried it, but it won’t work in IE for me… :(
I need a very simple MessageBox like this … is there anything out there?
I mean a small thing, without an library needed, like mootools for growl…

By: Thomas Hansen

Thomas Hansen — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 22:30:00 +0000

Really cute, but I cannot possibly imagine that a fading in and out of a div with a jump animation is of higher interest than a major release of an Open Source Ajax library being the second largest for it’s platform which again is the second largest platform in the world… ;P
But oh yeah, sorry it was for .Net and Mono – and you guys are Java and PHP evangelists… (and Adobe paycheck receivers… ;)
Seriously, I’ve throwing cookies after you now for so long I don’t know what to do except rebuild the http://ajaxwidgets.com/AllControlsSamples/Ajax-Window-Madness.aspx to read CodeProject’s RSS for our next release… ;P

By: Michael Geary

Michael Geary — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 19:42:38 +0000

Useful but unobtrusive messages are a great idea, but when I tried out this demo, I didn’t like the experience. (Sorry!) It may just need a little tweaking and then it could be pretty nice.

Here’s what went wrong for me:

I click a link in the middle of the page, and a message fades in near the top of the page – where I am not looking.

As soon as I start to notice that message, another message *bounces* up at the BOTTOM of the screen. The movement catches my eye and I start to look down that way instead.

Before I clicked, my attention was focused on the link I clicked on. Now my eye is being drawn to the top and bottom of the screen at the same time.

I don’t know about you, but when I’m looking at a web page, where my eye goes, the mouse soon follows. I’m always moving the mouse around, and when I see these two messages, I naturally start to move the mouse toward one of them.

But as soon as I nudge the mouse, the message at the top disappears! (I use the TrackPoint on my ThinkPad – it’s even worse with a regular mouse, because it’s pretty hard to avoid moving it a little after a click.)

I don’t think of clicking the link at the bottom to see the message – I don’t mentally connect the two because they are so far apart.

It shouldn’t be too hard to fix these problems:

* Put the message and message log at the same location and tie them together visually somehow. (Maybe have the message roll up into the message log link? Or that might be too distracting – the fadeout is probably less annoying.)

* Don’t make the message disappear on any mouse movement. I’m not sure exactly what to suggest here, but it needs to be less eager to dismiss the message.

I look forward to trying version 2! :-)

By: mdm-adph

mdm-adph — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 16:55:42 +0000

I think I might port this to Ext just for the hell of it.

By: Adam Sanderson

Adam Sanderson — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 16:25:12 +0000

That’s pretty nice. The message log is very slick as well. The key points are that it does not interrupt the user, but still shows useful information.

By: EmEhRKay

EmEhRKay — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 14:39:56 +0000

I love when these basic things get cool names – Growl and Humanized Messages as dummed down alerts.
I do think that the concept is cool, and I will implement this feature in my applications. Very OS X-like

By: Pelle

Pelle — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 11:45:00 +0000

Very nice look! Will definitely consider using or mimic this in my applications!

However, in what way is it a jQuery-plugin? It seems to be using it’s own JavaScript-object as a base? Perhaps I just haven’t come across this type of jQuery-plugins before.

By: Georges Jentgen

Georges Jentgen — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 11:25:47 +0000

I like the Growl-Imitation better.
I implemented a similar approach for a project: http://www.sms-news.lu but I found it to be quite easy to implement. You just need a container div to put your message in and a small function to show it.

I used prototype and scrip-aculo.us to do it. Was quite easy!

By: Harald

Harald — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 10:35:20 +0000

Nice idea, does not try to imitate growl … and looks a lot better than alert ;-) … including some clean code. Imo not very jQ plugin style, it uses a global handler, not a new method for $/jQuery().

The one from icebeat looks also shiny, like the original growl. I also coded a growl-like message queue, no human big centred message but queued like I know it from skype notifications, it will go into the new MooTools plugin forge. I really hope that it will become as human as this message library.

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 10:25:13 +0000

Nice – anyone know of something similar for Prototype?

By: Alex MacCaw

Alex MacCaw — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 08:25:08 +0000

Nice, but I prefer JQuery growl: http://icebeat.bitacoras.com/mootools/growl/