Unity For Fedora (As in OpenSUSE or Arch)

[Adam Williamson]

On 2012-02-01 14:49, Florian Müllner wrote:

> Except that applications can set a 'resident' hint on notifications, 
> in
> which case a representive icon is kept in the message tray, from 
> which
> the notification can be recalled; together with the ability to 
> provide
> actions on notifications, the experience is not different from status
> icons.

Not different...except that you can't see or interact with the icon in 
question unless you perform a distractive action (move your mouse to 
bottom-right corner or trigger the overview). Doesn't exactly fit in 
with the 'distraction-free computing' idea if you have to cycle through 
the overview every five minutes to check if a notification icon changed 
while you weren't paying attention.

The whole GNOME 3 notification area is something of a bizarre 
netherland: there doesn't seem any logic to its existence. Unlike 
traditional notification areas it's not tethered to a panel, a concept 
users generally understand. It's just this kind of ethereal 
(non-)presence which sort of reserves the bottom right hand corner of 
your screen (and hence, really, the entire bottom portion of it, since 
if you try to interact with anything there you'll forever be triggering 
the notification area accidentally) but sort of doesn't, because it's 
not always visible. It's an odd bit of UI altogether.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net