Desktop Notifications FAQ
1 General Questions
1.1 What is the Desktop Notifications Framework?
The Desktop Notifications framework provides a standard way of doing passive pop-up notifications on the Linux desktop. These are designed to notify the user of something without interrupting their work with a dialog box that they must close. Passive popups can automatically disappear after a short period of time.
1.2 What are the components of the framework?
The Desktop Notifications Framework consists of notification-daemon and libnotify.
notification-daemon is a daemon which manages drawing notifications using theme engines on the desktop. It can be spawned by a DBUS API which can be used to create notifications using DBUS.
libnotify offers a library to show desktop notifications in a standard way.
2 Theme Engines
2.1 How do the Desktop Notifications integrate into the GNOME Desktop theme?
The standard theme engine is based on the current GTK+ theme and inherits it's settings.
However, other notification services, such as [http://growl.info/ growl] have already shown that not everyone wants something that just simply fits in with the rest of the desktop's look and that they might want more "interesting" looks for the notifications which are provided by the theme engines.
2.2 Why not use GTK+ drawing engines?
There is no point to having GTK+ themes handle notification drawing. It might be compared to insisting that "GTK+ themes should also draw metacity window borders". GTK+ theme engines do not lay out windows, they define how widgets look and which colors to use.
