The Counter-Intuitive Nature of Notify-OSD

I don’t know what the guys at Canonical were thinking when they dreamed up Notify-OSD, Ubuntu’s new(ish) notification system. If you’ve ever used Growl on a Mac, then you know how amazing on-screen notifications can be. A new IM comes, a little unobtrusive box appears with the user’s display pic, name and their message. If you click on the box you can open the message. In some systems, there’s even a close icon on the box so you can dismiss the window before it naturally times out. This is intuitive behaviour.

However, Notify-OSD’s design specs very clearly state that their notifications are absolutely non-interactive. You can’t dismiss it and you can’t open the triggering program with it. All you can do is mouse-over to have to blur out to a translucent mess. It’s not themeable, you can’t change the time-out duration and you can’t disable them without removing the app altogether.

When did Shuttleworth start to like the idea of dictating behaviour and aesthetics to a group of users dedicated to freedom and choice?

</rant>