"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. "
