Mark Shuttleworth recently posted about the work Canonical are doing on application notifications, and a couple of things struck me.
The first thing that struck me is that even though what they’re doing is quite pretty, it’s intensely pointless. Designing a notification system that will spew out messages that the person using the computer doesn’t need to see is making the computer less useful: it’s another piece of UI vying for my attention, and every time something interrupts what I’m going I’m losing concentration. It’s not helpful for productivity at all, in fact, it’s helping destroy it.
