Visual bell

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

Hi Folks:

We need a "visual bell" for the desktop (for accessibility, and to avoid
annoying our class/cube neighbors:-).  It's a small feature, and I
pretty much know how to hook into it (using XKB's bell notification
mechanism).  

The questions are these:

1. what visual feedback to provide, and 
2. where does the feature live?

I think the best answer to #1 is to provide several, user-selectable,
since not everyone will want a "fullscreen-flash", and some users will
need something more prominent than an applet or flashing a window
border.

My guess is that since the window-border flashing is an obvious
possibility, and any app can flash the screen (by posting a big window
and then unposting it), the most likely candidate is Metacity.

What do you think, Havoc?  I can probably provide a patch for this, with
conditional compilation so that Metacity doesn't have to depend on XKB. 
However I think you would be the right person to decide how a
"window-decoration-centric" visual bell feature should look and be
implemented in Metacity.

The above proposal is based on hooking the "system bell", but we will
also want eventually to hook into anything that uses "desktop sounds" so
that various visual alternatives to sound files could be provided;
something like that could probably just be an applet.  But for things
that are not gnome-sound-savvy, or which just "beep", we need something
simple like "visual bell".

best regards,

Bill