810754 - [Notifications] Should appear w/ time stamps when displayed in Utility Tray and Lock screen

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia::System, defect, P1)

Description

[Josh Carpenter [:jcarpenter]]

When notifications are viewed on either the Lock screen or Utility tray they should be appended w/ time stamps in the upper right corner of the notification box. 

As per visual design specs: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/9xxxcxiflo3qpsb/ValHjcgEfW

Incomplete feature work, nom'ing as blocking+. This is an important part of the utility of notifications.

Comment 1

[Etienne Segonzac (:etienne)]

What happens for notifications more than a day old?

Comment 2

[Josh Carpenter [:jcarpenter]]

Good question. Displaying total hours would not be of much value. We should instead switch to simplified dates such as "1 day ago". Don't we use PrettyDate elsewhere in the UX?

Comment 3

[Etienne Segonzac (:etienne)]

(In reply to Josh Carpenter [:jcarpenter] from comment #2)
> Good question. Displaying total hours would not be of much value. We should
> instead switch to simplified dates such as "1 day ago". Don't we use
> PrettyDate elsewhere in the UX?

We do, but a pretty date takes a lot of width.

Comment 4

[Josh Carpenter [:jcarpenter]]

Respectfully re-noming. 

* This is a notification system. It's near worthless without a time stamp.
* This is not an addition. It's incomplete feature work.

Etienne, let's format as follows:

* Within past minute: Just now
* Within past two minutes: 1 minute ago
* Within past hour: 24m ago
* Within past day: 2:45 PM
* Within past week: Friday
* Within past month: Feb 25

I've mocked that up here, and the sizing looks acceptable: 
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qnmzwbeamcge39q/Notifications_timeformats.jpg

cc'ing Patryk to double check the visual consequences.

In case of overflows, let's apply text-overflow:ellipsis to the first line of the Notification text.

Re: localization, am cc'ing Stas. Stas, are other languages friendly to the sort of the truncation I'm using above? eg: "24m ago" = "24 minutes ago".

Comment 5

[Josh Carpenter [:jcarpenter]]

cc'ing Clee for product input on basecamp nom.

Comment 6

[Rafael Rebolleda]

FWIW, I agree notifications without a timestamp are mostly useless,  especially everything related to comms.

IMHO, pretty dates will involve more work and risk + localization. I'd rather get this in with simple, raw date/times if necessary. Pretty dates are polishing; none at all is frustration.

Comment 7

[Etienne Segonzac (:etienne)]

Kaze, does the current l10n pretty date match Josh's suggestions?

If it does let's go!
If not it is indeed a risk.

Comment 8

[Fabien Cazenave [:kaze]]

Pretty dates are supported by our l10n library already, but as Étienne mentioned it takes a bit of space (e.g. “3 hours ago”). If we want to use “compact” pretty dates (e.g. “3h ago”) it has to be modified a bit, and this should be a rather low-risk change. Using compact units such 

The other difference that I see with your proposal in comment #4 is that our pretty date lib doesn’t switch to absolute dates after a day: it says “4 days ago” instead of “Friday” or “Feb 25”. This part will have to be handled by the system app itself, our l10n_date lib already supports these human-readable date formats anyway.

Overall, my opinion is that supporting compact, pretty dates for notifications in the same day would be worth it (not much more work + small risk).

Comment 9

[Fabien Cazenave [:kaze]]

EDIT: (missing part)
> using compact units such as 'h' and 'm' should be i18n-proof.

I can work on this if it gets a bb+ label.

Comment 10

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

(In reply to Fabien Cazenave [:kaze] from comment #9)
> EDIT: (missing part)
> > using compact units such as 'h' and 'm' should be i18n-proof.

I'm pretty sure you didn't mean it, but just to clarify:  we should still put these short labels into shared/locales/date/date.en-US.properties, e.g. 

  shortMinutesAgo[other] = {{m}}m ago

Comment 11

[Fabien Cazenave [:kaze]]

follow-up: bug 814355

Staś: yes we should add these strings in the date.*.properties resources, but my point was that I /guess/ that this compact form (e.g. “18h ago” instead of “18 hours ago”) should exist in all supported languages — see comment #4.

Comment 12

[Alex Keybl [:akeybl]]

Etienne - please let us know if this is at risk for the C2 milestone so that we can try to find another assignee as necessary.

Comment 13

[Etienne Segonzac (:etienne)]

(In reply to Alex Keybl [:akeybl] from comment #12)
> Etienne - please let us know if this is at risk for the C2 milestone so that
> we can try to find another assignee as necessary.

It really depends on the target date for bug 814355.
Kaze?

Comment 14

[Fabien Cazenave [:kaze]]

There’s a patch proposal for bug 814355, let me know if it suits your needs.

Comment 15

[Michał Budzyński (:michalbe)]

Attachment: patch

Comment 16

[Etienne Segonzac (:etienne)]

(Easy) comments are on github :)

Comment 17

[Etienne Segonzac (:etienne)]

https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/commit/c3f3f22e3b1a1526e648ae978f6cd746136e75c7