Add Desktop Notifications

[YoganshSharma]

Currently, HERMES does not provide any desktop notifications. Adding notifications will improve user awareness and experience by alerting users to important events even when the app is minimized or running in the background. Ensure notifications are clear, timely, and not intrusive.

Discussion Points

• Where and for what events should we notify?
  • File download completed
  • File upload completed
  • New file/message received from a peer
  • Connection lost/re-established
  • Error events (e.g., failed download/upload)
  • Peer joined/left the network
  • System updates available
  • Sharing paused/resumed
• Should notifications be silent or include sound?
• Should we allow users to disable certain notifications?

Tasks

• Integrate Tauri’s Notification API and create a notification utility.
• Add notification calls to relevant parts of the codebase.
• (Optional/Not a priority) Add a basic notification settings UI for users.
• Test notifications across Windows, Linux, and macOS.

References

• Tauri Notifications plugin

[saksham-kumar-14]

Can I work on this?

• I think there should be sound notifications for error events, connection lost/re-established and system updates. For others there can be silent notifications.
• And it would be fine if we allow users to disable all notifications except the ones which include sound.

Thoughts?

[dhanvithnayak]

I think sound notifications for connection lost/reconnect and updates will get annoying pretty quickly

[Signor-Koala]

I think there should be sound notifications only if the user can easily disable/enable them. Also a very soft notification would do, not something like a discord ping which is loud.

Also, I believe you can delegate the management of notification sounds to the operating system / desktop environment, so that is something to look into while testing.

[saksham-kumar-14]

I think sound notifications for connection lost/reconnect and updates will get annoying pretty quickly

Yeah, only error notifications should have sounds then, and we could allow users to enable/disable all other notifications except errors.

Also, I believe you can delegate the management of notification sounds to the operating system / desktop environment, so
that is something to look into while testing.

Got it, will do