Some issues related to Notifier.exe

[gepardec-wf]

Hi Wokhan,

some things i noticed with notifier.exe
i kept no screenshots, but will try to describe it as clearly as possible.

during the initial configuration phase of a new device the number of blocked connections can be excessive. i use adobe creative cloud software and this very annoying software consists of many components that all like to phone home in short intervals. also, they do not stop after several attempts, like a good behaving application, instead they initially bombard WFN with hundreds of attempts in a few seconds. during this phase, i usually had to use the actions 'skip this application' or 'skip all pending' a lot. at first it seemed to work, but sometimes the skipped entries started to reappear. it seemed, "they could not be forgotten". my attempted solution to these problem was to manually delete the log files in the WFN root directory. there was one primary log file, but in my case also about 10 additional ones with names such as *.log_10 (if i remember correctly). i assumed this was caused by a bug, but maybe some kind of limit would be good too?

another issue that happened: after skipping some entries i usually flip through the remaining entries in notifier. often, the shown icon did not match the information below it any more. if i remember correctly, after clicking the link to the file location the icon updated and matched that information.

after blocking the most annoying offenders, the number of blocked entries naturally decreases and these problems do not happen that often any more. but one major problem that always seems to happen: if there are several accumulated blocked entries in notifier and you start to use 'skip this application' multiple times, when applying it for the last possible time (on the last remaining item) the whole notifier application seems to quit (or crash?) instead of minimizing itself to the taskbar and waiting for the next blocked connections. you then have to manually restart it, so you get notified again. if this problem is easy to fix, it would have maximum impact on user experience.

minor issues related to the skip button in notifier: you can click that button to skip/forget entries or switch between its different modes. so far, so good, but switching the mode does not feel "fluid" enough. for example, when choosing the mode from the dropdown, the menu is visually hard to separate from the background (eg. the other buttons to the left). after selecting a mode, the length of the button changes but the rest of the buttons do not move to make place. so they overlap temporarily until manually updating the UI by clicking the next or previous buttons (if i remember correctly). this is my main concern. in addition to that, because of the way the dropdown is designed, (in my opinion) you cannot be sure if you have only selected that mode from the dropdop menu or if you also have triggered the action. i would try to optimize that dropdown, it is a small change but would have a great impact on user experience.

one last thing i would like to suggest: al least on windows 11, if notifier is minimized and a new connection is blocked, instead of showing the notifier window again ("un-minimizing" it/popping it up again), the application causes a windows notification to appear ("open notifier" or something like that). this behavior got annoying quickly because you had to dismiss the notification and open notifier manually anyways. the solution was to forbit notifier to show notifications. still, the notifier does not "un-minimize" itself, but at least the annoying notifications disappeared. in any case, the changed icon in the taskbar indicates when there are new entries. personally, i would prefer an option to make notifier reappear automatically - or not. if you disable this option, you could use notifier in some kind of silent mode (eg. during gaming or working) and still use the taskbar icon (or the "app-like" notifications) as an indicator.

Greetings!

[wokhan]

Hi!
Sorry I wasn't able to follow up on your comment. I'll check all this asap!!!
Thank you :-)
Regards