inline system notifications

[Bryan Clark <clarkbw gmail com>]

I was just dealing with some notification stuff, looking at the Ubuntu thing versus libnotify - it seems a mess but is beside my point here.

I think the FIrefox style of inline notification system has worked out pretty well as a way to inform people of events in the application that are "modal-ish".  And I was thinking that for gnome-shell you guys could look into something very similar for the shell.

I did up a simple and quick mockup, using the existing gnome-panel because I can't seem to get gnome-shell to appear on my system yet.
http://www.gnome.org/~clarkbw/designs/system-inline-notifications/

I'm in the middle of something else but also tried to put together an animated gif, flip book style, version to help explain (4 frames! 1 per second!)
http://www.gnome.org/~clarkbw/designs/system-inline-notifications/system-inline-notifications.gif

The goal is to provide people with a modal-like dialog that has to do with the desktop / system itself.  Dialog with ( OK ) / ( Cancel ) buttons suck and mostly because it's somewhat difficult for the user to understand where they came from.  I've tried to design these things a million times with a "operating system look" but it's not much use.  What really works is when the dialog is actually connected to the system that needs attention.  The Mac does this with sheets and that's also another option that could work with this or instead of this.

The inline system notification gives you a place to insert a desktop wide notification that doesn't get mixed in with the window manager and other windows and could only be raised by something like the shell itself.  I'll leave you guys to take it or leave it but figured since you're on a new path you could fix up some of the mistakes of the past.

Ignore the obvious errors in wording, lack of matching battery icons, and old school panel.  You get the design quality you pay for, which is probably similar quality to when I was paid for it :)

Cheers,
~ Bryan