14 DAY TRIAL // Long-time GNOME developer Allan Day reports on some of the upcoming improvements that are coming to the built-in Notification applet of the GNOME 3 desktop environment.
The Notification applet you see on your GNOME desktop right now has been introduced in the 3.16 release of the popular project, which is used by default in numerous GNU/Linux distributions. But as nothing in this world is perfect, it looks like its user interface needs some improvements here and there.
"One of the main goals for this is to focus the UI - to improve the signal to noise ratio, by refining and focusing the interface," reveals the developer in his latest blog post. "The number of extraneous visual elements is dramatically reduced, making it much easier to pick out interesting information."
The quality of the notifications will be improved as well
According to Allan Day, another area of the Notification applet that needs to be improved is the quality of the notifications displayed there. For example, the applet should no longer display notifications for events that are not of interest to the user, nor those pesky, sticky notifications. Check out the attached mockup for details on that.
Therefore, the plan for the upcoming GNOME 3.24 desktop environment, due for release on March 22, 2017, is for the Notification applet to get a UI revamp that will display only notifications from various apps that are of interest to the user and reject notifications after a period of time if they are read.
Additionally, each notification should have a useful heading and body text that inform users about what's going on without the need to click on them. All these will most currently improve the overall productivity of GNOME users, and if you know of a GNOME app that is still not using notifications, report it immediately.