Ash’s Theory of Progressional Persistence

Cross-posted from the Particls blog.

There is a common problem amongst any program that generates any kind of alert. It’s quite a significant problem too because while I might have configured Outlook or FeedDemon to show popup (“toast”) alerts, if I have happened to turn around to talk-to or help a co-worker, then yep, there goes my important alert.

Who knows, my wife may have had a baby and I wouldn’t even know about it! 😉

Seriously, it’s a problem. At work, like most people I don’t just sit in front of my workstation without blinking and I am tired of missing things while I happen to be elsewhere, possibly reducing the security permissions for staff on the network.

Similarly, you can’t just throw stuff to the user’s screen and leave it there. A user’s desktop is a sacred place, and you can’t go about just leaving your shit lying around where you like. That type of annoying behaviour is what we call an “Uninstallable Offence”.

Missing alerts is a problem – one that Touchstone is guilty of too.

But this will soon change. Because I feel that whether or not an alert should persist is directly relative to how important the item is to a user. If the importance of the item is inside the top 25% of the threshold for that output adapter, then the alert should persist (at least our alerts will). Of course there will be an option to turn that off.

I will try to implement it over the next few builds.