The developers are still working on the prototype

Mar 9, 2015 14:33 GMT  ·  By

GNOME developers are pretty serious about their new toy called Nuntius, which will help them provide notifications from Android phones to the GNOME desktop.

The ability to get notifications on the desktop from the phone seems like a trivial matter and not all that important in the grand scheme of things, but it captured the conversation over the weekend, especially among GNOME and KDE fans. The former are thrilled about the features such an app would bring, while the latter were talking about how they have this function already available for the first time.

Nuntius is still in its early stages and it will take a while to get it in top shape, although they did say it was going to be ready in time for GNOME 3.16 (working prototype), which is really close to end of the development cycle. This is why the developers have tried to explain a little bit better what the app does and what they plan to do with it.

Nuntius will have a single basic function, for now

Soon after the developer announced Nuntius, all sorts of questions have started flowing around, some more legitimate than others. The most important is probably the one regarding the iterations with the notifications. For now, the application will only have notifications displayed, with no way of integrating them, like answering an SMS directly from the PC, for example. The good news is that the devs want to know if this is really important to the users.

"First of all we want to stress again that what is available today is basically a prototype: as soon as we had something able to connect and show the notifications we went ahead and published it because we think “release early, release often” is the best strategy when it comes to free software," said Ignacio Casal Quinteiro in a blog post.

He also explained what the application will actually do, why they have chosen Bluetooth instead of Wi-Fi, what the future plans for it are, and why there is no iOS version. The last one is actually funny, they simply don't have an Apple device to work with. For more details about this really cool project you should visit Ignacio's blog.