Re: [Usability] Incorporating UI Innovations from Upstream Projects to GNOME

[Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>]

Le jeudi 23 septembre 2010 à 09:58 +0800, Allan Caeg a écrit :
> Hello,
> 
> There's a discussion on Mozilla's Usability list
> ( dev-usability lists mozilla org ) entitled "Keep bar-style
> notifications for Firefox 4 on Linux instead of doorhanger
> notifications which breaks consistency on GNOME desktop." You can find
> the discussion here and the related bug report here. 
>
1:http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.usability/browse_thread/thread/21871b42093e5196
> 2: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=598337
Interesting. Indeed, it's a real issue which threatens the consistency
of the desktop if GNOME doesn't address it.

I think it would be very interesting to integrate these notifications
from within GNOME Shell. It already has desktop-wide notifications (i.e.
based on old school libnotify), and it's currently treating modal
dialogs differently from other windows, by attaching them to its parent.
It would make sense to me to have a way for applications to say: "this
dialog is a notification", which would make the Shell show it with a
special visual (e.g. slightly transparent), and pointing to a special
place (e.g. the Application menu of the Shell).

Then Firefox wouldn't create notifications on GNOME 3, but dialogs with
a specific hint, and the environment would take care of the rest. The
advantage is that all of our applications would easily benefit from this
design if they feel the need for it.

I'm CCing Jon McCann, who's responsible for the design of the Shell, to
hear what he thinks, and if my ideas are not too mad...

For the people that are not aware of the way Firefox "doorhanger
notifications" work (like myself), see :
http://people.mozilla.com/~faaborg/files/20090821-notification/newNotification-i1.png