It's a fundamental rule of human computer interaction—the user should be in control of the relationship, not the computer.
If we spoke to people the way computers speak to us, we'd be considered rude beyond belief. Whether it's our operating systems or web sites, they're constantly haranguing us to stop what we're doing and pay attention to them.
Let me be clear. There is NOTHING a computer needs your attention for that can't either be handled on its own or that can't wait until you're ready to pay attention to it.
If you're interested in being notified about an event, whether it's a new message coming in, a process completing, or an error that's happened in the background, you should be able to have that notification appear when the event occurs. But that should be your choice.
The distinction between "important" and "unimportant" notifications should be made by the user, not the machine.
Let me be clear. There is NOTHING a computer needs your attention for that can't either be handled on its own or that can't wait until you're ready to pay attention to it.
I think hardware failures are probably the only class of notifications I'd want to be told of immediately. I had a HD start to go bad that was in a striped RAID array, I suspect it's been in that state for awhile and only learned of it when the RAID firmware had red in it when I restarted the PC and happened to be sitting there. I don't know why Windows never complained (I've seen "HD is bad" notification messages before in XP, but not this time - maybe the RAID controller abstracted the failure away?).
Similarly, I would also like to know if there were critical thermal problems in my laptop.
In the case of imminent hardware damage or data loss, I'd like to know.
It's a fundamental rule of human computer interaction—the user should be in control of the relationship, not the computer.
If we spoke to people the way computers speak to us, we'd be considered rude beyond belief. Whether it's our operating systems or web sites, they're constantly haranguing us to stop what we're doing and pay attention to them.
Let me be clear. There is NOTHING a computer needs your attention for that can't either be handled on its own or that can't wait until you're ready to pay attention to it.
If you're interested in being notified about an event, whether it's a new message coming in, a process completing, or an error that's happened in the background, you should be able to have that notification appear when the event occurs. But that should be your choice.
The distinction between "important" and "unimportant" notifications should be made by the user, not the machine.