A common place for all long running tasks to be visually shown

Description taken from Mathusalem project, on which implementation could be based:

The idea is to have a common place for all long running tasks to be visually shown, instead of a whole lot of progress windows everywhere. This way it wouldn't clutter the user desktop (since these background task shouldn't by essence be intrusive) while allowing other applications to get information about these tasks (ie progress state, files involved, etc.) over dbus. (description from: http://tw.apinc.org/weblog/2006/05/26#summer-of-code-acceptance)