Event Naming Specification

Overview

This specification gives direction on how to name the Event types (triggering feedbacks such as running the haptic motor or blinking an LED) that are available for use by applications, when creating a feedback theme. It does so by laying out a standard naming scheme for Event creation, as well as providing a minimal list of must have Events, and a larger list with many more examples to help with the creation of extended Events for third party applications, with different event types and usage.

This is similar in spirit (and heavily based on) to the Sound naming spec.

Context

The list of default contexts for the feedback theme are:

  • Alerts: Events to alert the user of an action or event which may have a major impact on the system or their current use
  • Notifications: Events to trigger feedback to notify the user that the system, or their current use case has changed state in some way, e.g. new email arriving
  • Actions: Event that notify the user on their actions.
  • Input Event: This triggers feedbacks that give direct response to input events from the user, such as key presses on an on screen keyboard

Event naming guides

Here we define some guidelines for when creating new Event names that extend the standardized list of Event names defined here, in order to provide Events for more specific events and usages.

Event names are in the en_US.US_ASCII locale. This means that the characters allowed in the Event names must fall within the US-ASCII character set. As a further restriction, all Event names may only contain lowercase letters, numbers, underscore, dash, or period characters. Spaces, colons, slashes, and backslashes are not allowed. Also, sound names must be spelled as they are in the en_US dictionary.

Events for branded applications should be named the same as the binary executable for the application, prefixed by the string “x-”, to avoid name space clashes with future standardized names. Example: “x-openoffice-foobar”.

Standard Event names

This section describes the standard Event names that should be used by artists when creating themes, and by developers when writing applications which will use the Feedback Theme Specification. Application developers should only use event names from the Applications section as the other sections are reserved for system components.

Applications

These events are meant to be used by applications.

Notifications

  • camera-focus: The event used when the camera got focus.
  • camera-shutter: The event used when a photo was taken.
  • message-new-instant: The event used when a new IM is received.
  • message-new-sms: The event used when a new sms is received.
  • message-new-email: The event used when a new email is received.
  • message-missed-email: The event used when an email was received but not seen by the user.
  • message-missed-instant: The event used when a instant message was received but not seen by the user.
  • message-missed-notification: The event used when a notification was shown but not seen by the user.
  • message-missed-sms: The event used when a sms message was received but not seen by the user.
  • phone-incoming-call: The event used when a phone/voip call is coming in.
  • phone-missed-call: The event used when a phone/voip call is was incoming but not answered.
  • phone-outgoing-busy: The event used when for outgoing phone/voip call when the responder is busy/not available.
  • phone-hangup: The event used when a phone/voip call is hung up.
  • phone-failure: The event used when a phone/voip call is terminated because of a failure.
  • alarm-clock-elapsed: A user configured alarm elapsed.
  • timeout-completed: A user configured timeout completed (e.g. a stop watch).

Actions

  • message-sent-instant: The sound used when a new IM is sent.

Input Events

  • button-pressed: The event used when a button is pressed.
  • button-released: The event used when a button is released.

System Components

These events are meant to be used by applications.

Actions

  • bell-terminal: The sound to use as a terminal bell.
  • screen-capture: A screenshot was made
  • theme-demo: A event that should be played for demoing this theme. Usually this should just be an alias for a very representative sound (such as a incoming phone call) of a theme that would work nicely as a demo event for a theme in the theme selector dialog.

Alerts

  • battery-low: The Event used when the battery is low (below 20%, for example).
  • power-unplug-battery-low: The power cable has been unplugged and the battery level is low.

Notifications

  • battery-caution: The event used when the battery is nearing exhaustion (below 40%, for example).
  • battery-full: The event used when the battery is fully loaded up.
  • device-added: The event used when a device has become available to the desktop, i.e. due to USB plugging.
  • power-plug: The power cable has been plugged in.
  • power-unplug: The power cable has been unplugged.

Input Events

  • window-close: The sound used when an existing window is closed.