Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 23rd Dec 2008 20:18 UTC
As part of its initiative to improve the usability of the Linux desktop, Canonical has made a proposal for a desktop notification system for both GNOME and KDE. Mark Shuttleworth announced the proposal on his blog earlier this week. The mockup video shows notification more or less like the 3d party Growl system for Mac OS X. Since we are talking Linux here, the meat is in the implementation details and cross-desktop compatibility.
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Member since:
2005-07-01
What I hate about notifications is the way they seem to become a manifestation of an application's ego. It's as if the developers have decided that their app is so important that the user will want to be notified of every little thing it does.
Take, as an example of this, Firefox's "Firefox has found updates for some of your extensions" notification. This fascinating tidbit of information which is clearly non-critical - I don't know anyone who interrupts their browsing to act on this info - is delivered not using the OS's built in notification system but rather Firefox's own system which crawls above all other apps to interfere with whatever you're doing. At best it's bad manners. In some situations, it can be a downright nuisance.
Usually there's some option somewhere to turn this type of thing off. In practice notifications should all be off by default. The user should have to say "I want to be notified of X, Y and Z", not "Stop bugging me about W".