For the work on my thesis I needed to make some adjustments to the settings on my computer, mainly in the settings for notification. This is the short story about why I needed to do that and why it is awesome.

My thesis is basically a replacement for the Dock, Exposé, the icons on your menu bar and maybe even a part of your Dashboard. It combines a switcher for open windows with widgets and other notification thingies. For now I am in the beta-stages of the prototype: most of it works, but it has bugs. And how do you find and investigate bugs? You test it of course!

So, I hooked up my iPad, started the daemon in the background and loaded the page, placed the iPad above my keyboard and used my computer... The very first thing I noticed is that the notifications on the iPad were more subtle since they use slight movement in my peripheral vision. I noticed that because the notifications on my screen (Growl all the way) grabbed a larger part of my consciousness than the movement on the iPad.

For this to work I had to disable all notifications which were also on the iPad. So, into Growl settings and yank out Cover Sutra and Adium. All was well and the hints on the iPad came through better :D Notification-wise this project looks like a success, I am very pleased with the result; we will see what others think about it in a month or so.

But, the adventure was not done. After I stopped testing I forgot to re-enable the notifications on my system. Suddenly the people started talking to me often did not get a response because I just did not know they were talking to me... And to be perfectly honest, it were such tranquil days...