Add notification bubble when new features are released

[radian628]

No description provided.

[radian628]

whoopsie i didnt realize hitting Enter would post it haha

[radian628]

something like this

[jared-hughes]

Could you paste over some of the discussion about this? Or write down some main ideas.

[radian628]

Here's a summary (to make it less painful to read through than a big conversation lol):

I've come to the conclusion that a lot of DesModder features that aren't enabled by default aren't very discoverable. We floated some ideas about how to fix this and came to the conclusion that we want to avoid anything too intrusive (no popups, no tooltips covering stuff, no enabling stuff by default to the point where it clutters the UI, nothing like that). We figured the least intrusive thing that would still get users' attention would be a "notification bubble" similar to the one you see on Discord and other apps when they have unread notifications.

As of now, my understanding of the proposal is to have:

• A notification bubble show up whenever DesModder updates. This disappears when the menu is clicked.
• All plugin sections and plugins with new changes/features have a bright "New" tag next to their names in the menu.
• All plugin settings that are new have a similar notification bubble to indicate that they're new.

I'm still not totally sure how we'll deal with the "new" tags on individual plugins after opening the menu for the first time. Should they disappear once the user closes the menu and reopens it? Should we wait 10 minutes or an hour and then remove them? Should we wait for them to open/close the menu three times before removing them? Removing them once the player expands and/or interacts with them is a given, but it almost seems a bit too nagging to keep them up for potentially days or weeks after someone's installed the plugin. That being said, them being nagging is kind of what we want.

All of this considered, I think the ones on the plugin level should be permanent until that plugin is expanded. Conversely, the per-settings ones should only exist for the first time the new plugin is expanded (seems a bit annoyingto make a user tweak every setting to get rid of notification bubbles for them).

We can detect new settings automatically by storing the names of every single setting in extension storage and comparing them against the names of settings after an update. If there's a difference, we add the new/different settings to a list of ones to mark as "new". We might also want a feature for manually flagging a plugin as being changed if there's some significant feature change but no new settings to match.

[jared-hughes]

We should include the changelog inside the extension (regardless of notification bubble). The changelog should have a notification bubble as well.

[FenyLabs]

A notification bubble show up whenever DesModder updates. This disappears when the menu is clicked.

I believe what we had discussed was to show a notification bubble on first install. Before we do menu redesign with "about" and changelog, it seems a bit silly to show a bubble that doesn't lead you anywhere.

[radian628]

I believe what we had discussed was to show a notification bubble on first install. Before we do menu redesign with "about" and changelog, it seems a bit silly to show a bubble that doesn't lead you anywhere.

I thought it was on every update. First install almost seems a bit redundant because then everything would be marked as "new." I'm probably misunderstanding what you're saying here though.

[radian628]

We should include the changelog inside the extension (regardless of notification bubble). The changelog should have a notification bubble as well.

Where should we put the changelog?

[radian628]

Also to be clear "This disappears when the menu is clicked" refers to the notification bubble on the top-level of the menu. All the per-plugin ones still remain. The idea is if someone finds the bubble annoying, they don't have to check through every plugin to get rid of it.

[radian628]

Also, should we do the settings menu overhaul before we do this?