[michael_dorfman]

The decision about when to be notified or not, and what's important vs. unimportant, should be your decision, not your computer's.

But isn't that the status quo?

I can't think of any piece of software I use that doesn't give me a fairly easy way to temporarily turn off the notifications. I don't want to get notified by Facebook? No problem, I shut it down. Don't want to be interrupted by my telephone? I put it in silent mode. Etc., etc.

[cjoh]

Google+ notifications on the search page.

[TeMPOraL]

Almost invisible. I notice them only when I'm not focused and start looking around for distractions. I'm a bit angry at that, because a notification that you notice several days after the event it refers to is usually worthless.

[jaysonelliot]

Both MacOS and Windows.

The OSX dock bounces when an application thinks it has something important to tell you. Windows grab focus away from the user when a process completes. MS Outlook throws email notifications up at you, even when you're presenting to an audience on a large screen—always fun to see the subject lines of emails showing up while a presenter is trying to talk.

On your iPhone, you are forced to dig into the preferences to find and turn off the "Automatically ask to join networks" option if you don't want wi-fi notifications popping up all over the place any time you are on the move.

Off should be the default for notifications, not on.

[freehunter]

My god this is so frustrating. I work in information security, and there are a lot of events I need to know about the very minute they happen. So I have my email client notify me in the only way it knows how: popup notifications. Now these on their own are fine, I love them. I can glance at the subject and the sender and know if I need to respond. If I'm busy, it disappears after a few seconds.

But damn if it doesn't grab the focus of my screen while it's there. There are a lot of times I'm looking at a piece of paper while typing an email or report, not looking at the screen. If I've gotten a new email since I started typing, everything I typed in the meantime has been triggering shortcuts on the email notification. Some of them have been deleted because I was typing when it popped up, some people have gotten part of my typing as an email response.

Lack of attention on my part? Sure. Lack of foresight on Novell's part? You bet your ass.

[icebraining]

Frankly, is the default that important? Change it once and it's off. Even if you do that for 40 applications, it's still a very small amount of time in total.

Maybe I'm biased, though; exploring the Settings/Options is usually the first thing I do when I run a new application.

[jaysonelliot]

I think you're mistaking "what an advanced user can put up with" for what the best experience should be.