Comment 3 for bug 883046

I completely agree. In fact, notifications are almost useless the way they are right now.

Click support.
First of all, notification bubbles SHOULD BE clickable which also implies to remove that confusing hover effect. 99% of times, a notification requires user attention, IF there something to notify, is highly probably that THERE IS something to attend to, but, the way it works right now, user only can see that something is happening and nothing more, if one want to do something about has to find by itself which application fired that notification.

Proposal.
My proposal is to have an unified behavior for all notifications:
On left click, first, look for a custom action for that application (applications should be able to send it with the message). Second, if there isn't a registered action, look for the main window of the application that fired the notification, bring to front and give focus, and finally, if there is no application window nor application indeed, just ignore that click.
On right click, dismiss the notification, marking it as read it.
This way, independently of the applications, you can bring to front the one that need your attention.
I think that buttons inside the bubbles and multiple custom action aren't a good idea, as they ends up by having an heterogeneus behavior across applications. But,... to support text links could be fine, I think.

Notification Queue.

The other aspect I think make notifications useless, is the fact that two (or more) notifications of the same "type" can't be showed at the same time and go to a queue. The most common case when this is noticed is when two contacts login and at the same time someone else chat you, you'll see that someone has logged in, a few second later will see that another friend has logged in, finally almost a minute after, you will see the message who talks to you. Most probably by the time you see the notification, you've already answered.
And this is the simplest and more frecuent example, but the situation could be much worst, when you have a music player, gwibber, etc.
It's pretty obvious that if you have a lot of applications running, you will have a lot of notifications, but that's not problem of notifyOSD module, the problem that appear in this case is the delay between the event that fired the notification and when it is showed, and this IS concerned by the notifyOSD module.

My proposal.
Stack notification bubbles vertically while the screen's height allow, when not, then send it to a queue. This behavior plus the action of dismiss notifications by right clicking on it, could improve a lot the usability.