Emergency Notification Icon

Hello Everyone

This suggestion is for an Emergency Notification Icon that is basically perhaps clear when status normal and bright red (and maybe flashing) when the Emergency Notification is active. This notification would be active under a variety of user-defined possibilities. Some of them would be a severe weather alert, an important news alert (by subject), an emergency call-out by some emergency agency (i.e. police, fire, ambulance, military reserves, search and rescue team, doctors' hospital call etc.).

This icon can be triggered by either an email account reserved only for the user to receive an emergency notification or by an instant messenger notification or by an emergency posting on a website.

Yes we realise most emergency personnel will have a cell phone or pager but there are many who would like to have the notification flash on their screens all the same perhaps due to a severe weather notification or an Amber Alert.

Any further ideas about this?

Here is The Emergency Email and Wireless Network. Here is the Community Alert Network for some ideas. For the serious reader this page has many links as well.

Gets my vote! I need this feature to make the next level of plugins work!!!

I think it's a good idea, probably way beyond my scope really. I think the Homeland Security Advisory System skin works because it's a really simple system and available on a national scale (well global really).

I think this plugin would have to be email orientated for it to work for personal alerts. Developing a plugin to recognise particular subject lines and then displaying the relevent icons shouldn't be too hard.

Another example would be for Mail Monitor to recognise a certain sender, whenever they send you a mail, a photo of the sender could flash or appear on the bar. Hopefully there would be an option to browse for a picture inside Mail Monitor and link it with the Sender's string. Failing that i should imagine the skin.ini file would be easy enough to set up.

Hopefully we'll see an upgrade to the mail monitor(i haven't even used the current one yet) that will allow these sort of things. Sometimes i think i should have chose the route of being a coder.

Just out of interest what is a State 3 PNG. Does it just mean it can handle transparency?

I'm up for a challenge! However, clever stuff like animation would be damned hard to do without some modification to the Weather Monitor plugin.

A 3-State PNG is simply a PNG image with the three phases of the button (Normal, Pressed, Highlight) stacked one above the other, as described here. You can use any feature of PNG including transparency, but you must ensure that the 3 states are the same dimensions (i.e. if each button is 20x60, when stacked they make a 60x60 PNG).

Hope that makes sense!