[Design] notification: little icons

[Kaitlin Duck Sherwood]

I was reminded of something I saw at SGI.  I don't remember the name 
of their email client (Z-mail, maybe?  or maybe it was an internal 
tool?), but when you got email from someone, a little icon with their 
picture (pulled from the employee database, your own prefs, or 
random) would splat at the bottom of your desktop (where the Apple 
dock is, more or less).  When the next message appeared, another icon 
would splat down to the right of the first.  When you ran out of 
horizontal width, it would layer the next message overlapping the 
first.

It could be a bit overwhelming to return from a day off to discover 
thirty or forty little icons staring at you from the bottom of the 
screen, but it was also nice to see what kind of fires were burning 
just by glancing at your screen.

I think "one icon per message" is a bit too coarse, but perhaps a 
variant would be useful.  For example, the first message from Wendy 
would show her picture with a purple background.  The second, blue 
background.  By the time six messages from Wendy had piled up, she'd 
have a red background.

Or I could have a different icon for each of my groups: bosses, 
immediate colleagues, others at my company, family, friends, 
skydiving team, mailing lists, etc. and each group has an icon whose 
border changes color.  (I'd want my mailing list icon's colors to 
change less rapidly than my boss'.)