David, I have to say I’m not surprised. I recently happened upon this image and thought I should bring it to your attention.

Coincidence, I think not…

It’s a map of our lovely Cambridge, but when you connect the lines from Rob “Zombie” Love, Joe “Broke Your Car” Shaw, and Nat “Lefty” Friedman I think you’ll see something not quite so lovely. Now I’m not saying that this map is definitive evidence of a well coordinated and executed attack from certain people obviously directed at your car (look at the arrow!), but everything seems to suggest that.

My advice for now is to stay calm, lay low, while we coordinate our own blitzkrieg.

Matt, I think the bad chili has effected your mind.

A while back I did some mockups for ideas related to bubble up notifications, I was cleaning out some files in my design folder and saw them, so I figured I’d share.

Notification Area Bubble Up

This was to demonstrate how notifications can bubble out of an item in the notification area. This is a notification that requires interaction before it disappears, the user must click the [OK] button for this to clear.

Launchers responsible for their notifications

So taking the idea a little further I went for notifications where the launcher of the application was responsible for providing the notifications coming from the application. I was hoping this provided a better alignment between the mental models of the application, it’s launcher, and it’s notifications to the user.

If there were a queue of notifications for this application they would all remain bound to the launcher and history would be available via a context menu. I left out the image where I tried to show in the icon that the application was active, the idea still needs work.

Slight Fade In and Fade Out of Notification

Then I did a quick animation to show how a typical notification might appear and disapear. Note that the bubble doesn’t just appear, it has a slight fade in, which is quicker and less noticible than the fade out. In my sketch I made it grow out of the launcher, however it became too difficult for me to show it in The GIMP.

Thanks to the work of our next-generation x.org all stars, (owen, soren, and carl) who we are calling “The X-Men“, the design collective at Red Hat is constantly being asked to show more cool ways things like composite and transparency could be used. I have a cool app switching sketch drawn up right now, but I need to convert it to the computer before I can share.

Note: Just because this is about notifications and a notification system was proposed for inclusion in GNOME does not mean I approve that implementation or specification.

I was reviewing the gnome-games component this morning looking at whether we should be thinking about trimming out some of the games from the default install. Right now the menus in Fedora look pretty bloated with a lot of games that are not all that great.

Thanks to ADD I got distracted and started wondering if there is a Texas Hold’em game out there for GNOME. Seeing as we now have easy network support for gnome-games I was envisioning being able to play against other people in a quick game of poker but my attempt to search for this game revealed nothing, except the ugly world of blog comment spam.

Sadly I never did find a Texas Hold ‘Em game.