Notification badge workflow discussion
Right now NeoChat's Task Manager shows a badge with the total number of unread DMs and mentions. This is useful for a workflow that involves being in tons of chatrooms you mostly ignore, but you care about people talking to you personally. This is how Discord works.
However, it works less well for a workflow where you do actually want to pay attention to every message in every room you're in. With this workflow, currently you can miss some messages and only see them hours later. For this workflow, it's beneficial for the Task Manager badge to reflect the total number of unread messages. This style of badging is used by Telegram and KMail.
Which one is right? Neither! It depends on your personal workflow, how many rooms you're in, how chatty the people in those rooms are, your personal sensitivity to interruption and unread badges, and also the approach used by other apps you use that also show Task Manager badges (it's beneficial when they all use their badges in the same way).
Thus I propose making this behavior somehow user-configurable. Here are some options I can think of:
- By default use the Task Manager badge to show the total number of unread messages, but don't include messages in rooms marked as low priority. The user can opt into workflow #1 by marking rooms they don't care much about as Low Priority
- Add an explicit option in the settings window to let the user choose whether the number in the Task Manager badge includes unread messages that aren't mentions or DMs and default to one of them I guess