Ubuntu’s desktop notification system will see major improvements in the upcoming “Karmic Koala” release.

The most notable and obvious of these is simple how they look. The large rectangular pop-up’s familiar to users of Ubuntu 9.04 ‘Jaunty Jackalope’ are replaced with an all-the-more sleeker, smaller bubble.

Moving your mouse near or over one of the new-style notification toasts triggers a new blurred-out “proximity-fade” effect. This isn’t just purely a visual lick, but there to let you see or interact with whatever is behind the notification too.

In this screenshot I edge my mouse towards the pop-up, it blurs and fades: –

When my mouse is actually on the notification it fades almost completely until I edge away again. This is great because it lets me see any application underneath the bubble with no issues.

Hovering your mouse over an notification also pauses the ‘time out’ period in which a bubble fades which is especially handy if the alert is likely important and you don’t want to “miss” reading what it says when you’re needing to peek behind it.

NotifyOSD: Better All-Round

Other work going into Notify-OSD for Ubuntu 9.10 includes reducing its CPU usage, speeding up its overall rendering, and ensuring that bubbles look nicer on desktops not using fancy compositing features. 

Another neat addition is that “non-critical” announcements are not shown when running an application in fullscreen. This should mean no more Gwibber alerts about insane social network chatter whilst you’re popcorn deep in latest episode of True Blood — woo!

Of course, some notifications will still show when apps, games or media are running fullscreen, namely system-critical updates like low battery, an app has crashed, etc.

A degree of ‘spam protection’ is also planned for Notify-OSD — no, this isn’t designed to filter out e-mail alerts featuring generous gifts from offshore princes, rather handling “flooding”, i.e., when large numbers of alerts are sent in short sequence from the same app.

Rather, multiple updates fired from the same application (or window) will ‘merge’ together in an expanding bubble instead — that should be good to see!

Here’s a look at the icons that NotifyOSD will use to accompany various actions: –

You can see most of these improvements in this short YouTube clip: –

[broken]

In summary, notifications in Ubuntu 9.10 will offer:

  • Better CPU usage
  • Faster rendering
  • Improved visuals on composited and non-composited desktops
  • KDE integration
  • New ‘mouse over’ effects
  • Time out delay
  • Spam/flood protection

If you fancy hosing your system trying out the latest version of notify-osd, Ubuntu developer Mirco Mueller (aka Macslow) has a PPA playground with his works and hacks on Notify-OSD, which you can find @ /launchpad.net/~macslow/+archive/ppa

For more information on the development and progress of Notify-OSD, be sure to check out Mirco’s informative (if sometimes irreverent) blog @ macslow.thepimp.net.