When I have notifications on in Pidgin, I have to disable most of them. Otherwise, people signing on, signing off, messaging me, etc, generate almost constant dings and pop-ups. I especially like the semi-transparent click-through-ability of the notifications on display. I hate it when I'm about to click 'close' (or on another desktop), and a popup appears at the last second, causing something entirely unexpected to occur.

I'm in favour!

With the newer versions of Ubuntu...it's really not that far behind, in terms of usability. In fact, in a lot of ways (apt-get, or "Package Manager") it's way, way ahead.

I don't buy that it's not ready for Joe Sixpack. It's been ready for years now. He's just stuck on Windows for the time being. If you gave a Ubuntu machine to a Joe Sixpack who'd never used Windows before, he'd do just fine.

Another stab: You exist in a 3d world. Your brain is pretty good at navigating in a 3d world. And, you can display more information in 3d than you can in 2d. It gives you a whole other dimension to play with.

All the information on your computer *could* be presented in 1d. At some point, it really was. Adding the extra dimension made it a heck of a lot easier to display information, and allowed you to stuff more info onscreen at one time.

The win from 3d vs. 2d isn't as huge as the win from 2d vs. 1d...because really, you can process 3 dimensions, but in the end it ends up being 2d. Still, it's a win.

IMHO, a lot of the possible uses for 3d interfaces haven't been invented yet, and probably won't be until they exist.

I'm in love with the idea of Croquet. It seemed silly to me at first, it doesn't anymore.