Macslow, who is working on notifications, recently posted some screencast of his last progresses.
The first image shows a colored title bar upon every notification. While the chance to display the urgency of notifications has been discussed, this work is just meant to be useful for debugging – at least for now.
The urgency bar will be displayed only in beta releases, to help the tester to debug and test how each applications uses notifications and spot possible abuses.
Having a bar looks similar to my interactive notifications concept. The purpose is very different, though.
The second video shows, other than a (what I believe is) a bugfix in the progress bar, a proximity fade mechanism. If you look the picture above, you’ll notice the notification started fading before the mouse got over it. Thumbs up, one thing I wished and never asked. 
The last video shows blurring capabilities. Pretty nice, I’m unaware of the intended applications of such concept. Any clue, anyone ?
PS: The videos are hosted on Mirco’s website, but I can easily mirror those if hotlinking is not ok.
