Calum: I couldn’t agree more; it seems like there is a lot of hacking going on on notification areas right now without any serious consideration of the use cases for such a thing. It would be great if some of the usability experts sat down and presented such a case clearly and explicitly, though, or else it’s all going to get implemented with random-ass stuff in it without consideration for the consequences, and we’re going to be stuck with the crack.
[Added later, after re-reading] Worth noting that I don’t say this to crap on all the work people have been doing; it’s great to see so much energy going into something we’ve needed for a while. It is just frustrating that it could be both a better user experience and probably easier to code if there were more serious consideration of the right use cases.