unity-design team mailing list archive

[Conscious User <conscioususer@xxxxxxx>]

> A notification appears (the mouse cursor is not below the notification).
> The user is now notified. When they move their mouse to that area (bear
> in mind that they are 'notified' and have no further use for the
> graphic) it once again fades away and reappears when the cursor departs.
> This, irritatingly hangs around for about 5 seconds.
> 
> I know! I am notified! Why are you hanging about cluttering my screen?

Because hovering your mouse over the notification does not necessarily
mean that you have already read it. It could also mean that what you
wanted to click on was more urgent than reading the notification or
that you were already in the process of going there to click something
and didn't want to stop (or simply couldn't stop, as a lot of actions
we do in the desktop are repetitive and become automatic and lightning
quick after a while).

At least for me, both of those cases are not rare.

> In my opinion (unless the notification does something like launching the
> relevant app or is dismiss-able by clicking on x) it should simply
> vanish when the user moves their mouse cursor over it. 

That would probably cause a lot of accidental dismissals.

Believe me, I'm the first in line to complain that NotifyOSD is *far*
from being perfect, but as you can see it is not exactly trivial to
come up with fixes that do not cause other, significative, problems.
There are a lot of different cases to consider.