Shell New Notifications | Goodbye Message Tray!

Notifications isn’t exactly the strongest point of Shell, but GNOME developers are planning some significant changes towards to a completely new notifications system. If they manage to accomplish what they are planning for version 3.14, we will get some amazing stuffs with an increased usability through a kinda unified notification system.

Designs haven’t freeze yet, and discussions are still continue, so this post is nothing more that a reminder like “Hey, this is what’s happening right now in GNOME!“.

Update: Allan Day is explaining in his blog what problems redesigned notifications are here to solve.

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Notifications Update

The goal of this feature is to resolve some long-standing design issues with the current implementation of notifications in gnome-shell, particularly with regards to the Message Tray. The plan is to give the Message Tray a new, more effective, layout, and to make it easier to access. Alonge the way, we want to address a number of other issues with notifications:

• Simply the code, to ensure maintainability and lower the number of bugs.
• Provide an easily accessible way to check how many items are in the tray.
• Make it easier to open the tray.
• Make notifications banners more noticable.
• Make it easier to target notification buttons with a pointer.

GNOME Wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/ThreePointThirteen/Features/NotificationsUpdate

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Notifications Designs

At this point, you have to do the reading how the new notifications are going to work ..but the following figure shows what about is going to happen!

• Documentation: https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/Notifications
• Latest designs: https://github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/tree/master/notifications

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Notifications Implementation

Notifications designs are from Allan Day, and the coding is from Jasper St. Pierre. Yeap, there is already an actual code for this!

The code is still very far from working, but if you want to try it yourselves you will find it at:

New-Notifications Branch: https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell/log/?h=wip/new-notifications

Just notice the whole concept is not yet done, so don’t consider these designs (you will see on Github) as final, while things like applications running in background are absent from here. Which is another goal of GNOME anyway.