Notifications Redux

Contents

A notifications and Message Tray design update. Details of the actual design can be found on the main notifications design page.

Key design features:

Notification banners are displayed at the top of the screen, individually, in sequence.
A list of notifications is included in the time and date drop-down, which is access from the clock in the top bar. This includes notifications which have been displayed as banners, but haven't been dismissed.
The time and date drop-down also includes birthday and event reminders, a calendar widget, time zone and weather information.

Design Goals

Combine the existing calendar drop-down with the Message Tray, in order to create a single place where you can:
- See what has happened recently (notifications).
- Discover reminders about events and birthdays.
- See information about ongoing background states, such as the weather and time zones.
Take advantage of the clock as a way to conceptually frame notifications, reminders and background information around the ideas of time and date.
Reposition notification banners to give them a clear spatial relationship with the day and time, and the time and date drop-down.
Retain the ability to quickly respond to notifications through in-line actions.

Some of the less obvious changes from the existing notifications implementation.

Notifications cannot be expanded within the "Message Tray". Instead, notification actions can only be accessed from banners.
Hot plug notifications no longer include an eject action, and they do not persist permanently - they behave like regular urgent notifications.
Music is no longer included as a special type of notification. In the future, this can be reimplemented using a different UI and API (meaning that the future of music controls is not as a notification but a special system integration point). This is to be decided.
Images in notifications are no longer a thing.