ideas about the notification bar

[Koppányi Tamás <kornenator gmail com>]

Hi!

As a whole, the gnome-shell is imho the best desktop environment out there, but i'm still having some issues with notifications. Getting right down to the point:

- when there is a new incoming message, new event, and i get the pop-up notification in the bottom of the screen, it's a bit confusing, that the whole notification bar becomes visible with it. or so it seems, because the items that are supposed to be on the notification bar aren't displayed, only the gradient gray bar itself. i think it would be much cleaner, if there was only the pop-up itself isible. probably this could be solved with themes, but i'd really love the basic system to come like that, since most of the 3rd party themes i tried aren't nearly as ergonomic as the default one

- it's also a bit redundant to have all empathy (or other instant messaging apps') chat windows dwell on the notification bar. you have windows in the overview mode, and also in the alt+tab switcher. notification bar should be used for notifications, and i think it would be best, if the chat events would be cleaned out when they become read.

- i'd welcome an option to be able to set up what clicking on these notifications do. for exmaple, i'd like clicking on them to bring up the messaging window, instead of this baloon preview only. or at leat having different types of actions for them, like left click brings up the preview, middle click the whole window, right clicking the context menu. now one has to click the icon, then click inside the preview to get to the conversation window. or you could just bring up the conversation window on click, and (after a short delay) show the preview bubble on mouseover.

- positioning on the elements of the notification bar is still a bit hard if one cannot use a high-precision pointing device, because of the slide-to-reveal the name animation. something more seamless would be better imho, like the magnification of the osx dock. also, having the titles of the notifications appear under or above the icons would be better, this way you wouldnt need any sliding at all.

- a new message counter would be welcome on the icons of the notifications bar.

- this might be an empathy bug, but there is a problem with clicking on the empathy text every time after i start something, that also puts a persistent icon on the notification bar (like ekiga, banshee or rhythmbox). after boot up until i start somthing like these programs, clicking on either the icon or the text works fine, but after that, only the icon is clickable.

I have to add that i am not a developer of any kind, so my notices might not be professional enough, and i have absolutely no idea how difficult it would be to implement them, please excusem e for that, i'm just trying to look at it from a common user's perspective.

K.T.