Notifications in SGPro are a bit of a mess. In the current version has them scattered in several different areas. You’ll find them in the status bar, in the sequence notification window, event notification windows and also in these temporary windows that would sometimes pop up and “self-expire” after some number of seconds.
Old sequence notification window:
Old event level notifications:
In order to correct this, SGPro has now centralized notifications in to its new Notifications Panel. This panel holds, in chronological order, a history of all notifications issued during sequence execution. Each notification has a “level”; specifically “Information”, “Alert”, “Warning”, “Error” or “Image Completion”. Each notification type is differentiated by a clever icon for quick visual identification. The Notifications Panel will allow you to filter out “Information” notifications in order to better see more important ones. In addition to this, you can show messages issued in only the last hour.
Notification panel:
When the Notification Panel is not open, SGPro will show individual notifications in the lower right hand corner (“Information” notifications do not show as individual notifications). Of course, these “single notifications” also appear in the Notification Panel when it is opened.
Single notification (when panel is not visible):
The Notification panel can be opened by clicking on the new “Notifications Icon” on the right side of the tool bar. In addition to opening the panel, this icon will also let you know if there are new notifications to see.
Upper right side of SGPro, No new notifications:
New (unread) notifications:
This method of organization should be fairly intuitive to most. In addition to centralizing notifications, this approach is based on modern notification handling principles found in your phone, MacOS and in Windows 10.
This new feature will be released in the next beta. Of course, we aim to ensure that it works properly, but we also want to collect feedback to understand how it can be changed to be more useful.
Some notes:
- Notification tiles can be clicked and take context sensitive action. Currently only “Image Completion” notifications can be clicked to open the image inside SGPro. If you can think of other helpful “click actions” from notifications, let us know.
- If you identify notifications that are not present (or are miscategorized) let us know.
- These notifications are no longer saved with the sequence. In the current version of SGPro, we do save past notifications with the sequence, and unfortunately, this has proven to be a source of confusion for long running sequences (it can sometimes, especially when you are tired, appear as though issues from a previous night have occured again on this night).
- Each notification has a time and date attached to it. The current display method for the day it was issued is to print “Today” or “Yesterday”. This is done in hopes of making the message more quickly readable. If a notification pre-dates yesterday (long running sequences), then the actual date will be displayed.
- If you are interested in pruning your own list and keeping only the notifications you want, you can close them individually.
- Don’t confuse this with SGPro’s external notification system (email, SMS, test files, etc). That system remains unchanged in this release.