Idea: Cross-desktop notification daemon

[Simon Ulsnes]

Hi!
I'm developing a system using D-BUS, currently implemented in Mono,
that will ideally be able to show little popup-notifications (for
instance, someone logged on to IM, disk space is running low, updates
are available, etc.).

The idea is this: We have a daemon that is a D-BUS service. This takes
care of receiving and dispatching the notifications (so if your
application wants to display a notification, you invoke
org.freedesktop.NotificationService.Notifier.Notify). The daemon has
clients attached, which register themselves with the daemon. These
clients can be implemented in Gtk, Qt or whatever, it doesn't make a
difference, the only thing they have to do is implement the Notify
interface and register themselves with the daemon by providing their
service name and object path
(org.freedesktop.NotificationService.Notifier.RegisterDisplay).

So when the Notification service receives a notification from an
application, it forwards the notification to all clients attached,
which then take care of displaying it. The clients are called
"displays" (I guess 'client' is actually a wrong term, since that
would be the applications actually sending the notifications).

As I said, the daemon is currently implemented in Mono, mostly because
it's a proof-of-concept and I haven't managed to get my head around
the raw D-BUS API (it would be nice to not use GLib in the daemon so
that it is completely independent - Now, I know Mono uses GLib, and
current daemon also uses Gtk for the main loop, but again it is only
an example).

I think this project would fit nicely into fd.o, and so I will request
that it can be hosted here. I would also like other people to join in
on development - I haven't got time to finish it right now (exams),
and some things I don't have a clue how to implement (such as
callbacks so applications can react to the user, for instance,
clicking the notification).

Ideas are also welcome.

Simon Ask Ulsnes