mouseover behavior

notification-bubbles rendered by notify-osd are not interactive and actually allow you to click-through. As you correctly mention this is indeed by design. Notifications are just that notifications, not meant to interrupt you current workflow. If an application want to get your full attention - for whatever reason - it should not "abuse" a notification for that, thus rendering their true purpose irrelevant. For such cases the application should open a proper dialog, if it expects the user to take action and interact with it.

I agree with akolahi. This is counter-intuitive. The notifications are very pretty and the blur is neat-o, but when I'm surfing the web or writing code or Doing Something Else while I am chatting in Empathy I expect to be able to click the notification which should center and focus my chat window so that I may respond to an IM (for example). Or when I get a notification of new e-mail, I want to click the notification to execute some handler that opens my registered mail program.

Being able to click-through is an interesting idea, but I suspect most users would want to click the notification to handle that event. Actually I feel like GNOME is taunting me when it blurs/takes away the notification. Its like its saying.... nah, you don't Really want that.

I agree too. The bulk of my notification are from email and chat. And every time that I get a alert I accidentally click on the notification, it's pretty irritating. Then I have to make 3 more mouse clicks to find out that my friend said "Hi". Please add this functionality.

Thanks

Not everybody wants to immediately respond to email and chat notifications... For these people, the problem of the accidental click is more problematic, so I'm not really for this. Now if there were some way for the user to be able to set whether the notification is clickable or not, that would be a different story.

My position is identical to James'. The framework would be much more powerful and useful if it allowed users to interact with notifications.

I don't believe in accidental clicking, people generally understand what they are doing. Should they accidentally click once, then the probability that they continue to accidentally click surely must decline over time.

I also don't believe in the ability for software to abuse notifications as being a reason to block interactive functionality. I say this because users have the option of whether or not they install software.

Apart from that, the notifications are great.

I'd prefer a mixed solution: A small button (like "Show") to trigger some event (focus the IM window, open the mail client) which is clickable and the rest of the bubble being transparent for clicking

edit: Sorry, I clicked on the wrong button, so now the question is marked as answered. :(

I agree, it's very counter-intuitive. I want to be able to interact with the popups, not have them run away from me. Or at least have the option to choose.

I have to agree. The current notification system without interactivity is pretty useless for most notifications I care about in my daily desktop usage (IM, email). Just as James describes I feel like NotifyOSD is toying with me when it just fades out the message when I'm trying to hover it to make it stay (to read long texts) or try to click it to react to it.

The design documents suggestions for this issue - as far as I understand consisting of opening the app in the background or not using NotifyOSD at all and letting each app figure out for itself how to display a strange window somewhere it pleases that can expand on user request somehow - seem like a large step back from what is possible with other systems and on other platforms.

I doubt anyone really needs the full suite of controls in a notification but focusing the application that sent the notification on-click imho is a must. The way NotifyOSD currently works creates no obvious connection between the sender and the displayed notification. I have to guess what app just created that notification so I can react to it....

Anyway. I really do hope this will become user configurable in the future because it really hurts the usability of the system for me.