Question

Whats the best way to detect if a user is currently at their computer, ie using it in some way. We have an application that should only issue notifications (banner notifications with a close button) if the user is at their computer.

For example, imagine a stock trading application that alerts the user to various time sensitive information that might be relevant for only a few minutes. If the user is away from their computer, they don’t want to find 20 un-actioned alerts to dismiss.

Answer 1

Technicaly I don’t know how to watch for inactivity but I think you could use timeout for notifications to close themselves after a time interval and/or to limit displayed notifications to few, so the newest one would automaticaly close the oldest one.

From the apple documentation:

Note: It the user wakes more than 15 minutes after a scheduled
notification is scheduled to fire, it is discarded. If the
notification repeats with an interval less than 15 minutes, then it
expires in 1 minute. Expired notifications are just discarded, unless
they repeat, in which case, they stay in the scheduled list and just
fire again later.