Ayatana-like notifications for Plasma

[Aurélien Gâteau]

Hi,

Yesterday I was thinking about the discussion we had at UDS about 
Ayatana-like notifications for Plasma.  For those who were not there, 
the conclusion was that the Kubuntu project was interested in making it 
possible for users to try a new approach for notifications.  This new 
approach was as follows:

- Passive notifications (aka notifications without actions) would appear 
in the top-right corner, and would be queued: if three notifications 
come at the same time, they would be displayed one after the other to 
reduce spamming.  These notifications would be using the Plasma tooltip 
background so that they are well integrated in the desktop, while 
looking "lighter" than the regular notifications.  The notifications 
would smoothly fade in on start and fade out when done.  They would also 
fade out when moving the mouse over them.

- Active notifications (aka notification with actions) would remain as 
they are: stacked on top of the system tray applet.

- This feature would be disabled by default, users would have to opt-in 
to give it a try.  This opt-in would be part of what we called the 
"Ayatana session".

(Please correct me if I wrote something wrong)


Fast forward to now.  We are in Feature Freeze, and I did not achieve as 
much as I wanted with regards to notifications.  Notifications are 
shared between GNOME and KDE, but there is no such thing as Ayatana 
notifications.

Yesterday I decided to give a try at implementing what was described at 
UDS, and it turned out to be quite simpler than I expected.  Here is a 
screenshot:

http://people.canonical.com/~agateau/tmp/ayatana-notification.png

Would you be ok with asking for a Feature Freeze Exception to include 
this in Karmic?  Default behavior would still be to show upstream 
notifications, but I would add an option in the system tray 
configuration to let the user enable Ayatana notifications.

Aurélien