feat(notifications): route all notifications through the in-app toast (from #349)

[ruzin]

Summary

Routes all app notifications through Steno's own frameless React toast (the one already used for pre-meeting reminders), instead of native OS notifications. Extracted from @Vassista's #349, adapted and made cross-platform-safe.

Approach (low-blast-radius)

Rather than rip out every call site, this replaces Electron's native Notification with an API-compatible shadow class (extends EventEmitter, same new Notification({title,body,…}) / .show() / .close() / .on('click'|'action'|'close') / static isSupported()). All 8 existing call sites and trackNotificationLifecycle keep working unchanged; two new send channels relay action/body taps back so each site's handlers + analytics still fire. The pre-meeting reminder moves onto the same class.

All 8 sites preserved with equivalent actions + icon types: shortcut, sleep-paused (Resume), silence auto-stop, system-audio mic-only (→Settings), note-ready (→note), meeting-detected (Take Notes), meeting-ended (Summarise), recording-failed.

Cross-platform

Reuses the exact window config the pre-meeting toast already shipped on both OSes (transparent, alwaysOnTop, skipTaskbar, focusable:false, top-right via workArea DIPs). The mac-only bits (visibleOnFullScreen, 'screen-saver' level) are ignored on Windows; the mac-only shortcut-notification gate is untouched.

Closure-bug fix

show() captures the window locally so closed/auto-close closures never touch a module-level ref a superseding toast reassigned; the closed handler is registered immediately so a superseded-before-load toast still emits close. 15s auto-close kept; passive dismissals still tracked.

Tests

• Generalized NotificationToast.tsx + app-icon.tsx color prop; new vitest for the icon mapping (5/5).
• notifications.t2 still passes (the enabled-toggle shown-signal gating intact).
• typecheck:renderer + ipc-contract (7/7) green.

⚠️ Reviewer: an intentional behavior change

The 7 previously-native notifications no longer appear in the OS Notification Center, have no notification sound, and auto-dismiss after 15s. Most consequential for the sleep-paused "Recording paused" notice, which previously persisted until dismissed. This trade-off is inherent to the feature (in-app toast vs. native). Flagging for an explicit decision before merge — everything else is behavior-preserving.

Credit: @Vassista (#349).

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Summary by cubic

Route all app notifications through our in‑app toast instead of native OS banners. Preserves existing handlers and makes notifications consistent on macOS and Windows.

• New Features

  • API‑compatible Notification replacement renders a frameless toast; all 8 call sites continue to work.
  • Pre‑meeting uses the same class (premeeting flag). Generic toasts relay body/actions via notification-body-clicked and notification-action-clicked; added state icons (alert, success, recording) and optional action buttons; AppIcon supports a color prop.
  • Behavior change: no OS Notification Center or system sound; toasts auto‑dismiss after 15s.

• Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a closure bug by capturing the toast window locally so close always applies to the right toast; maintains single‑toast supersede behavior and passive‑dismiss tracking.
  • Correctly attribute superseded pre‑meeting dismiss telemetry by reading the per‑instance flag on notif._window.

^{Written for commit 41a4f07. Summary will update on new commits.}

[cubic-dev-ai]

All reported issues were addressed across 6 files

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[Optic00]

Verdict: request-changes - the shadow-class approach is right and the closure work is careful (including the 13ba916 per-instance analytics fix), but the flagged behavior change is a real data-loss path for one notification, and the single-toast model drops concurrent notices while analytics reports them shown.

Summary

Replaces Electron's native Notification with an API-compatible EventEmitter class rendering into the existing frameless toast window, so all 8 call sites and trackNotificationLifecycle keep working unchanged. Two new IPC channels relay action/body taps back to main-side handlers. The pre-meeting toast moves onto the same class.

Findings

Blocker

• Sleep-paused "Recording paused" must not be a 15s toast. It fires exactly when the user is away: the machine slept, they come back minutes later, the toast (and its Resume button) is long gone - or a pre-meeting/note-ready toast superseded it - and the recording silently stays paused for the rest of the meeting. Previously this persisted in Notification Center. Suggestion that keeps the PR's shape: a persistent: true option on the shadow class (skip the auto-close timer, survive supersession or re-present while still paused), set for sleep-paused and arguably note-ready (also typically fires after the user walked away).

Important

• Single-toast supersede drops concurrent notifications, while analytics still counts them as shown. show() closes the current toast; notification_shown is tracked before the renderer even loads, and the superseded toast's closed handler then records a dismiss the user never saw. Real sequence: silence auto-stop → note-ready lands moments later; only the last survives. notifications.t2 keeps passing because each call returns shown: true. Even a small FIFO (show next on close) plus emitting "shown" only after presentation would fix both the UX and the numbers.
• Native notification semantics silently dropped: no sound (silent is ignored), no OS Focus/Do-Not-Disturb respect - and with visibleOnFullScreen + 'screen-saver' level the toast overlays fullscreen presentations, where the OS would have suppressed a banner. Part of this is the acknowledged tradeoff, but DND-bypass during a fullscreen presentation is the kind that produces bug reports; worth an explicit decision in the PR text, not just the sound line.
• Keyboard accessibility: focusable: false means Resume / Take Notes / Summarise can never receive keyboard focus - native notifications were reachable via Notification Center. Pre-existing for the pre-meeting toast, but this PR extends it to every actionable notification.
• IPC hygiene on the new channels: notification-action-clicked / notification-body-clicked (and the pre-existing close-notification-window) act on the toast without verifying event.sender === notificationWindow.webContents, and an unknown actionId still emits action with index -1. With #387 adding sender guards elsewhere, the one-line check + index < 0 rejection belongs here too.

Nit

• Toast always opens on the primary display (screen.getPrimaryDisplay()); a user presenting on an external monitor may never see it. Pre-existing pattern - following mainWindow's display would fix it cheaply.
• The action event emits ({}, index); current Electron exposes details.actionIndex and deprecates the positional arg. No caller reads it today, but it undercuts the API-compatible claim - cheap to pass { actionIndex: index }, index.
• getEventColor gives generic toasts a hash-of-title random accent bar (green/purple/pink/…), which reads as meaningful but isn't and clashes with the no-chromatic-accent brand rule; the iconType tint already carries the state. A neutral bar for non-premeeting toasts would fit the design system.
• If ready-to-show never fires (load failure), the window leaks invisibly with no auto-close armed; loadFile()'s rejection is also unobserved. A did-fail-load/.catch → close() caps it.

Praise

• The closure-bug fix is exactly right: capturing win locally plus registering closed immediately closes the superseded-before-load hole the old code had.
• The analytics split (renderer-tracked active dismiss vs main-side passive dismiss, _analyticsInteracted scoped per window) is preserved faithfully through a gnarly refactor.
• The API-compatible shadow class keeps the blast radius to one file section; ipc-contract and the icon-mapping vitest confirm the seams.