Hi!
Wouldn't it be much smarter for the system to detect when you do something in fullscreen (like watching a movie) and queue the notifications somehow? It could present them later in some kind of advance dialog or something when the user is finished with whatever he/she was doing.
Cheers,
Fab
Regardless of what the default method is to deal with the "fullscreen, do not disturb" issue, I would think there should be a way to quickly enable/disable the notification system. I don't believe there will be a "perfect," system that doesn't seem invasive to some user, somewhere, hence there should be a method to shut down the notifications if a user so chooses.
Coming from Mac OS X, this was always a major gripe for me. There would be some means to change a default behavior in the OS, but I would have to search out forums or wait for an advance user to blog about it. It would always be a terminal command or editing an xml file; it makes a user feel crippled, and eventually, that user will accept that behavior and just think that must be the "right," way to do it.
Or like me, they wise up and get the heck out of there :)
Just my thoughts on the choices that Ubuntu usually gives a user verses what I've seen by others...
-Anthony