notifications (window hints)

[Adam Williamson <awilliam redhat com>]

Sorry for vague terminology here, I'm not an expert. :)

so, in GNOME 2, an app can set some kind of hint that it wants to notify
you about something, which causes its entry in the window list to start
pulsing. the classic use of this (for me at least) is to know when
someone's pinged me on IRC: I see xchat's window list entry start
pulsing, I go and see what some idiot wants. :)

in GNOME 3, it seems like this hint is pretty much thrown away. the work
around i've been using is to enable xchat's notification plugin, which
makes it send a notification when i'm pinged. With the old GNOME Shell,
where this notification popped up at top-right next to my name and was
always visible, this was almost as noticeable as the pulsing window list
entry. With the new GNOME Shell, where the notification just pops up at
bottom right for a few seconds then disappears unless I go and manually
check that bottom-right area again, it's a lot less noticeable.

now, I was thinking: Nokia actually came up with a really great
notification system on the N900. when there's some kind of alert, the
'windows' button at top left goes yellow and pulses a bit. this doesn't
get in the way of anything but is always visible and quite noticeable.

can't we do something similar with GNOME Shell, for whatever window hint
xchat uses? Have it make the Activities button (or whatever you call
that thing at top left that says Activities...) change appearance
somehow, and then in the overview screen, change the appearance of the
thumbnail for the window which set the hint? Give it a yellow background
or make it pulse or whatever?

This seems to me a subtly different case from notifications, which is
why GNOME 2 handled it differently: xchat can't really tell me *what*
it's notifying me about in a way that works with the notifications
system, it's really just a 'you should probably look at this window now'
hint. It seems to me that it'd be a benefit to implement this into GNOME
3 alongside actual notifications, just as it was in GNOME 2, but fitting
the GNOME 3 interface.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net