[Usability] Notification Pop-ups

[Brian Skahan <bskahan etria com>]

It seems like it would be a good time to resurrect this thread.

http://users.avafan.com/~fredrik/activity/pictures/burn-notification.png

http://mspace.berlios.de/gunther-user/uploads/pages/MonkeyPop/python.png

I'm very glad to see progress on the notification pop-up system, been using monkeypop with Muine for a few weeks, its really nice.  That said, its just notification, a small pop-up with Artist/Title on song change, there's no option for interaction.

I'm really looking forward to some of the things people have mocked up recently for notification of presence, and see a need to interact with the "Notification Bubbles", but I also see how this could get way out of hand, with random HTML and SVG notification canvases.

1) Anecdotally, people want pop-up notification

2) Some people want some eye-candy

3) A pop-up can give you information that you want to act upon immediately

4) Pop-ups are really annoying

5) Its easy to render an HTML canvas unusable

---

1 2 & 3 are all addressed by current projects and/or mockups
4 & 5 are not

It would be good to come up with a HIG recommendation in the timeframe before any of these notification systems are proposed for inclusion in the desktop.  All the implementations are in mono at the moment, so odds of inclusion in 2.10 are slim to none.  2.12 may be a different case.

-Brian

Draft notification spec:
http://galago.sourceforge.net/specs/notification/0.4/t1.html

Relevant HIG:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/desktop-notification-area.html
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/windows-alert.html

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