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.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2008-03-17
Indeed. The KDE devs were proposing an overhaul based on the galago spec months and months ago (about half a year ago). The galago people apparently didn't want to work with them, nor did it seem to interest people on the gnome side.
Now comes canonical to save the day, and this is "big news". They want someone on the kde side to join them in making a new notification scheme. Where were they all those months ago?
However in some ways this is good for gnome in particular as it probably would have sunk had they actually tried involving the wider gnome community. In general it looks interesting and miles better than what exists now but some aspects are quite insane like missing the ability to dismiss notifications (very gnome-like, *smirk*).
Member since:2005-07-06
Oh c'mon! As someone who actually knows Growl as well as KDE 4.2beta I can tell you that there are some huge differences. For starters: KDE's is much more interactive. There are Stop and Pause buttons for longer operations like downloads, there are View and Ignore buttons for incoming chat messages, and so on.
Canonical's Growl imitation will have -- at least that seems to be the plan -- no interaction at all.
Member since:2008-03-17
you're grouping the kui viewer plasmoid with the notification plasmoids though they both look the same.
True that they are more interactive, but to me it seems silly to have a message come up and not (at least be possible) to interact with it, Really does one really agonize over the decision of whether or not to press the button?
But this is about the underlying gallago spec which kde has already implemented plus some modifications.
These notifications are merely a matter of preference.
If canonical wanted to do something really useful, they would commit to help clean up the system tray to be the way it is meant to be...persistent notifications and no other junk (idiocy of minimising programs to the system tray)
Edited 2008-12-24 01:18 UTC
Member since:
2006-02-04
KDE 4.2 already has notifications as proposed by Shuttleworth. See for example: http://blog.sayakbanerjee.com/?p=95. I actually like them quite a lot and I am quite impressed by KDE 4.2