suggested improvements for WebKit styles

[Eris]

It would be nice for WebKit styles to know the name (or bundle
identifier) of the application sending the alert and possibly the
internal name of the alert. I've created a Growl style that displays
icons as silhouettes, but this is clearly less than ideal for things
like iTunes album art and Adium's contact icons.

I suppose that this is ostensibly something that I, the style
designer, should not be allowed to use. It's also something that I,
the style user, would like to have. :(

I'll implement it myself if you guys will add it.

[Peter Hosey]

On Aug 19, 2009, at 21:01:56, Eris wrote:
> It would be nice for WebKit styles to know the name (or bundle
> identifier) of the application sending the alert and possibly the
> internal name of the alert. I've created a Growl style that displays
> icons as silhouettes, but this is clearly less than ideal for things
> like iTunes album art and Adium's contact icons.

The main problem with that solution is that it hard-codes iTunes and
Adium into your style, and you have to keep adding apps on requests
from users (or ignore them).

What if you silhouetted application icons but not notification icons?

[Christopher Forsythe]

On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 4:15 AM, Peter Hosey <p...@growl.info> wrote:

On Aug 19, 2009, at 21:01:56, Eris wrote:
> It would be nice for WebKit styles to know the name (or bundle
> identifier) of the application sending the alert and possibly the
> internal name of the alert.

I think this may be nice. Helping the webkit folks out any is a good thing. Especially if you're the one willing to write the code, that makes this even easier for us to say yes. That said, I'll leave this up to Peter to say yes or no from a technical standpoint.

[CJ Yetman]

While we're on the subject, I have another suggestion/request related
to Webkit styles...

It would be nice to be able to set a default image and include it
within the Webkit style so that, for instance, if I were designing a
Webkit style geared specifically to iTunes and the the track playing
does not have album artwork, rather than displaying the application's
icon, I could display a blank CD image.

I don't currently have the time, knowledge, or resources to implement
this into Growl myself, so I'm just putting it out there as a
suggestion. Thanks!
-cj

[Eris]

On Aug 20, 5:15 am, Peter Hosey <p...@growl.info> wrote:
> The main problem with that solution is that it hard-codes iTunes and  
> Adium into your style, and you have to keep adding apps on requests  
> from users (or ignore them).

You're right about that, and that's part of the reason I admitted that
I probably shouldn't be able to do it.

> What if you silhouetted application icons but not notification icons?

It seems there's not really a way to know which I'm getting, so the
WebKit plugin would still need some changes to the code. Do Growl
display styles written in Objective-C even know this?

[Eris]

Another idea came to me as I looked at the WebKit plugin's source:
perhaps the values that are substituted into the notification style
could be passed in as a JavaScript object as well. The display style's
Info.plist could include an optional boolean key, say,
GrowlScriptObject, so that we aren't passing objects across the
scripting bridge unless the style actually wants them.

I understand that Javascript ought to be kept to a minimum in Growl
styles, but I have used it to scroll a too-long title instead of
truncating it and it could simplify implementing the above case where
a style designer might want to display the icon differently depending
on whether it is an application icon or something else. :)