Description

Definition of a notification

Oxford says:
Inform someone (formally) about something.

Online BusinessDictionary says:
A notification is a authoritative or urgent, formal or legal notice.

Wikipedia says:
In information technology, a notification system is a combination of software and hardware that provides a means of delivering a message to a set of recipients.

What does exist in XWiki

What do other softwares or operating systems do

Facebook

Here we'll only take care of desktop notifications.

Red Alert Notifications

Red numbers that appear above ,  and .

A click on the icon shows the details of the notification :

• User that "wrote" something
• Type of action (comment/like/post/...)
• Name of the App (group/event/facebook/...)
• Icon of the App

The Facebook user sees the difference between old and new notifications and can choose to mark all as read.

Email Notifications

Notifications you receive via email.

Settings 

The Facebook user is able to enable/disable the notifications by email and/or in the website.

Mac OSX

A bit different than Facebook, Mac OS X has also its own notification system. It is very interesting since it shows the notification of several apps, where Facebook is one single website.
In XWiki, we might be interested in notifications for several apps, but it will be discussed below, in a future section.

There are 4 ways to get notified that an application needs your attention

Banners

Banners appear in the upper-right corner of your screen, without interrupting what you're doing. Banners appear  for a short period of time, then slide off screen to the right.

Alerts

Alerts are important announcements that appear similar to banners. Alerts remain on your screen until you take action. Many alerts include buttons you can use to interact with them without having to open the app that generated them.

Badges

Badges keep a count of how many new items or notifications are waiting for you in an app. A badge with a number appears on the upper-right of an app's icon in the dock to indicate how many new items are waiting. For example, a badge attached to the App Store icon indicates how many updates for the software you’ve installed from the App Store are available to install. A badge on the Mail icon in the Dock tells you how many unread emails you have.

Notification center

With Notification Center, you can see all of your notifications at a glance. To open Notification Center, click its icon  in the menu bar, or swipe left with two fingers from the right edge of your trackpad.

Do not disturb

If you don’t want banners to appear during certain times, you can temporarily turn off notifications using Do Not Disturb.

Settings

It is possible to choose, for each application, what kind of notifications the Mac OS X user wants : banner, alert, badge or in the notification center.

Confluence

Watch Pages, Spaces and Blogs

You can 'watch' a Confluence page, blog post or space. Confluence will then send you a notification email whenever anyone updates your watched content.
You'll receive email notifications for:

• Edits (unless the author clears the 'Notify watchers' check box).
• Deletions.
• Attachments, including new versions or deletions of an existing attachment.
• Comments, including new comments, edits of existing comments or deletions of existing comments.

Workbox Notifications

The Confluence workbox  displays all notifications collected from Confluence page watches, shares, mentions, and tasks. From your workbox you can reply to comments, like a comment or page, watch a page, or open the relevant page or blog post.

Email Notifications

You can 'watch' a page, blog post or space. Confluence will then send you a notification by email whenever anyone adds or updates content on that page or space. You can also subscribe to daily email reports and other notifications of various updates, as described below.
You will only receive notifications for content that you have permission to view. Users that have been disabled by an administrator will not receive email notifications.

Slack

Slack is an instant messaging software like Skype, Hangout, etc.

Slack can send email and mobile notifications when you're offline, and desktop notifications when you're viewing a different team, or working in another application.

By default, you'll be notified every time something gets posted to Slack while you’re away. You can adjust your settings to only receive notifications when your attention is needed, like when someone says your name, sends you a direct message, or uses one of your highlight words.

Slacks provides 3 kinds of notification:

Desktop notifications

Pop-up notifications on your computer.

Mobile push notifications

Updates sent to your iOS or Android device.

Email notifications

Mentions and direct messages sent to your inbox.

Settings

You can also customize your notifications with these options:

• App icon notifications: Activity badges on your desktop app icon
• Highlight word notifications: Alerts for important words and phrases
• Channel notification preferences: Adjust your preferences for specific channels
• Muting a channel: Never be notified of unread activity or receive notifications for a channel

Analysis

Checking all these softwares, websites and OS, we can see that:

• Notifications are used by the system itself and the applications
• There are badges on the apps
• In the notification center, the notification is a small box with:
  • The icon of the app
  • The name of the app
  • A small description of the notification
  • Who was involved with this notification
• According to the importance of the notification, the behavior is not the same:
  • The notification stays until you mark it as read or you reach the app
  • The notification is removed as soon as you get the notification center
• The user can choose what kind of notifications he wants and for which app