The pop-up notification (or toast, passive pop-up, snackbar, desktop notification, notification bubble, or simply notification) is a graphical control element that communicates certain events to the user without forcing them to react to this notification immediately, unlike conventional pop-up windows. Desktop notifications usually disappear automatically after a short amount of time. Often their content is then stored in some widget that allows the users to access past notifications at a more convenient time.
Desktop notifications are a proposed standard for freedesktop.org,[3] but all the major desktop environments running on the X Window System already support this standard, making them typically available on Linux and other Unix-like systems. Google adopted the concepts of notification drawer[4] and toast popup messages[5] for user notifications as basic components of its Android operating system.
As of 10.8 Mountain Lion, OS X provides desktop notifications via Notification Center. Previous versions of OSX have no built-in desktop notification feature; however, Growl is a popular application that provides similar functionality and enjoys broad support from third-party software.[6]iOS also includes Notification Center as of iOS5.
Capabilities
While passive pop-ups do not require any user interaction, some implementations still provide a way for the user to optionally interact with the pop-up. This is called actions.[citation needed] For the Freedesktop specification, this is an optional feature that clients cannot rely on, and its use is discouraged by some design guidelines.[7]
Android adds the ability to provide actions with Jelly Bean.[8]
In the Material Design language
Google's Material Design introduced the term snackbar to refer to a user-interface element displaying a temporary, closable notification:
Snackbars inform users of a process that an app has performed or will perform. They appear temporarily, towards the bottom of the screen. They shouldn’t interrupt the user experience, and they don’t require user input to disappear.[9]
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Toast_(computing), and is written by contributors.
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