A library for issuing notifications using FreeDesktop.org Desktop Notifications protocol. This protocol is used to communicate with services such as Ubuntu's NotifyOSD.

This library does not yet support receiving events relating to notifications, or images in notifications: if you need that functionality please contact the maintainer.

A DBUS Client is needed to display notifications, so the first step is to create one. The notification service will usually run on the session bus (the DBUS instance responsible for messages within a desktop session) so you can use sessionConnect to create the client.

To display a notification, first construct a Note. This can be done in pure code. Notifications can have actions, categories, etc. associated to them but we will just show a simple example (these features are not supported by all notification services anyway).

Use the function notify to display a Note. This returns a handle which can be passed to replace to replace a notification.

import DBus.Notify

main = do
         client <- sessionConnect
         let startNote = appNote { summary="Starting"
                                 , body=(Just $ Text "Calculating fib(33).") }
         notification <- notify client startNote
         let endNote = appNote { summary="Finished"
                               , body=(Just . Text . show $ fib33) }
         fib33 `seq` replace client notification endNote
     where
         appNote = blankNote { appName="Fibonacci Demonstration" }
         fib 0 = 0
         fib 1 = 1
         fib n = fib (n-1) + fib (n-2)
         fib33 = fib 33