Notification Disappointment in Ubuntu Jaunty

"Here are some of the specific things which bothered me about it.

"1. Applications which emit a notification that prompts for an action ­— something which they only would have done if they explicitly wanted to avoid grabbing focus, since popping up a dialog box is easy enough -- will have a modal dialog box pop up and grab the user's focus while they're working.

"2. Timeouts are no longer honored. It so happens that in my application I have an operation which takes 2 minutes to time out; I would really like my notification to stay on-screen for this entire time. I can still do this with notify-osd, but in order to do so I have to watch for the "closed" event and constantly create new notifications. A smoothly animating timer was a much nicer interface than a sequence of bubbles saying "In 30 seconds I will time out. In 25 seconds I will time out. In 20 seconds I will time out." Yes, I realize that the Ubuntu desktop team will say that I should do something different in this situation, but they're not designing my application and I don't like the options they've suggested. This would be much less of a problem if the provided notification timeout weren't so distressingly fast. "

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• First Look at Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope" Beta(Mar 27, 2009)
• My Experiences With Kubuntu 9.04 So Far(Mar 03, 2009)
• Editorial: A Quick Look at the New Notifications in Ubuntu 9.04(Feb 24, 2009)
• What If Windows Told You What It Was Really Doing(Dec 27, 2008)
• Understanding Canonical's New Linux Notification System(Dec 23, 2008)
• New Notifications for Jaunty(Dec 11, 2008)