GNOME 3.16 promises to be one of the best releases made so far and numerous changes have been already announced. The new notification system is one of them and it's definitely something to look forward to.

Not all desktop environments treat notifications the same way. Some are simple, some can't be dismissed, in others you don't have a history of recent notifications, and so on. No two DEs treat these notifications in the same way, which is actually a problem. The GNOME developers are now working to correct this issue and provide a proper notification system.

GNOME already has some pretty cool notifications and they've been shown all over the desktop in the past couple of years. Now, it looks like a major redesign is taking place and some functions have been grouped together in order to make everything more streamlined.

Notification history to be integrated into the calendar

Our colleague Marius Nestor noticed that GNOME 3.16 also comes with an updated theme and one of the images used for that also showed a new kind of calendar. Some users noticed that something has changed and the GNOME developers chose to explain in more detail what it's happening.

"One of the key goals for the notifications redesign was to provide an effective way to review previous notifications. In this way, notifications can be used to find out about what has happened in the past, as well as what is happening right now. With this ability, notifications can be used in an exploratory manner, to get an overview of recent events. This is particularly useful as a way to inform decisions about what to do next. As such, notifications can be a tool for directing our own personal activity," said GNOME developer Allan Day.

This means that the calendar had to be redesigned in order to accommodate the new features, which include stuff like alarms, system notification, messages, and pretty much anything in between. A nice touch is that the notifications are not only there to inform the users, they can also be used to take action and that makes things a lot simpler.

Some issues still remain and not everything will be implemented in this development cycle, but there is plenty to look for in GNOME 3.16.