How about taking it a little further?
Instead of just showing temporary notifications in the top-right corner (which fade away pretty fast), how about taking the notifications concept a bit further by implementing a notification center? It's been working extremely well for Android and iOS and I don't see why it would be less successful on a desktop. In fact, both Apple as well as Microsoft seem to be further integrating the notification center concept into their desktop software.
Basically the idea is that we have an indicator that opens a notification dropdown listing recent notifications. Examples include:
- unread mails;
- unread (social media) messages;
- software updates;
- software permissions;
- status of background tasks (up/downloading, im/exporting, syncing);
- calendar events.
For each new notification in the top-right corner, a counter would +1 on the indicator. Notifications are -1'ed when you click the "x" in the notification center or if you click on them when they appear in the top right corner. With the release of a notification center, counters on App launchers can be disabled and the user could choose to opt-out of on-screen notifications.
The purpose of the center is to give a quick overview of items that do not require an (urgent) decision but which contain valuable information that the user may want to respond to. The center will then help the user respond to the notification by providing direct access to the source of the notification (for example, that specific new mail, the software updater, Twitter).
This would be an indicator instead of a launcher because it affects multiple apps and because it needs to be within the user's immediate reach.
Personally I believe that a central notification center will make elementary feel even more integrated than it does already. It's been tried and tested and people love it.
I happily look forward to your thoughts. ;)
Blueprint information
- Status:
- Complete
- Approver:
- None
- Priority:
- Undefined
- Drafter:
- None
- Direction:
- Needs approval
- Assignee:
- None
- Definition:
- Obsolete
- Series goal:
- None
- Implementation:
-
Unknown
- Milestone target:
- None
- Started by
- Completed by
- Danielle Foré
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Gnome Shell has it too. ~grzesiek1e5
Even Android has (some of the) notification in bubbles. Things that should be there till some kind of action is taken should already be there. For example, we have a specific indicator for messaging, unread mails go there. --voluntatefaber
@voluntatefaber, when we talk about adding more permanent notifications, it would be possible to stuff all the social notifications into the messaging indicator without confusing the user. That's very reasonable and I believe that it is what you are suggesting. Still, I'd also be interested in a few other types of notifications, like background processes that I initiated myself such as downloads. For that we would need a different indicator, the result being that we have two indicators for notifications. Hence it makes more sense to have a single notification center. So that means that the e-mail indicator will be moved into the center; the chat indicator would remain the same since it's more of a quicklist than a notification. --KevinKleinman
How about using some space from desktops area for background notifications like downloads -Joshua Muresan
