How about a notification when someone fires the first shot. When you are online those thirty seconds between the first shot and the disable could give you time to pop a nanodrone. I hate seeing a disable notification come out of nowhere when I'm sitting right there.

Same here.
It always pisses me off when it happens, espeially when I'm badg hunting.
+1

me too, always happens, especially when planet hunting.

one problem though... any popup window would be worthless because you don't see popup windows until something on your computer updates your stats bar at the top inch of the screen.... such as buying/selling minerals, gaining xp, spending energy, or the shield and energy refresh timers on your screen...

if you're just sitting there chatting, it could be a whole energy recharge tick before you see the popup.. by then, you're disabled and you know it

dan can always code it on the attack system. if someone makes an attack, the system checks if the target is online atm, if he is, force an "update" on the target so the pop up happens.
The reason for the system check on whether the target is online is because I think it's cheaper(system res wise) to do such a check(especially as it's already in place) than to do such an update.

would add some system strain, but might be worth it

the entire game is designed where as far as it's concerned you are the only person online at the time
that's why you might not see the alert for a silthion queen until after it's dead...
...and it's why you don't know someone's attacking you immediately when they're attacking you unless you're doing missions or attacking or spending energy or get an energy or shield refresh
there's no continuous connection between your computer and the server, and the way web browsers are designed, the server cannot establish a new connection to you... you have to establish the connection to it... (firewalls block incoming connections)

probably the best that Dan could do is add the check for new popups to the code that checks for new comm messages.... heck, i'd even like to see all the popup messages echoed in red in the comm... that would probably give you the fastest chance of seeing the alert and being able to respond in time

Hmm that probably has lower overhead, put those in red or something. Polling the JGrowl popups all the time probably isn't good on his server performance, but the chat is already checking stuff frequently. Funneling alerts through that is likely to work, important ones though like planet under attack or someone is attacking you, not trivial stuff like bosses dying. We already get the "Base lock" alert in the chat -- so this is an extension of that, hell we can even have it in Settings that Dan has made as to what to alert you on chat.