Marina Zhurakhinskaya, a Red Hat employee working on Gnome Shell, explains the new messaging system for Gnome 3 on her blog. Gnome Shell is implementing a persistent notification system that saves notifications until a user interacts with them in an unobtrusive way. In sharp contrast to Canonical’s Notify OSD, notifications are also clickable.

The message tray in GNOME Shell enables persistent notifications. A new notification is first shown as a pop-out for a certain time period. When the pop-out is hidden, the notification is still available to the user in the message tray. The notification is only removed when the user interacts with it or switches to the application that sent it. This default persistent behavior ensures that the notifications are less disruptive to the user because the user is no longer forced to react to them before they time out.

Resident notifications often go along with rich controls in notifications. Rhythmbox notifications are a good example. Empathy chat notifications are also resident in GNOME Shell. Because they allow chatting inline in the text entry field they contain, making them resident enables the user to continue a conversation at any time. The resident behavior and rich features of Rhythmbox and Empathy notifications help minimize the distraction from intermittent events. They allow the user to react to such events at the user’s own convenience and without switching away from the window the user is working in. Transient notifications can also be used as a feedback for the user’s action within the system. For example, they are used when the user adds or removes a favorite application in the Activities Overview mode and allow undoing the action.

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Marina Zhurakhinskaya, a Red Hat employee working on Gnome Shell, explains the new messaging system for Gnome 3 on her blog. Gnome Shell is implementing a persistent notification system that saves notifications until a user interacts with them in an unobtrusive way. In sharp contrast to Canonical's Notify OSD, notifications are also clickable. The message ...