Comment 32 for bug 337352

Without the patch, gnome-user-share uses notifications to tell you a file has arrived and assumes that the notifcation system supports actions. notify-osd in Jaunty does not support actions, and so displays the gnome-user-share notifications as fallback notifications (ugly dialogs with a cancel/ok button that do the same thing, plus the other actions).

This is a sub-optimal situation, and applications are gradually being patched so that they don't assume that the notification system supports actions. Where an application needs to interact with a user (as is the case with gnome-user-share), a dialog that appears behind the other windows and doesn't grab focus is preferred as opposed to the fallback notification.

The patch here displays a dialog rather than sending a message to notify-osd, which would display it's (ugly) fallback notification. The advantage of the dialog is that you can control the layout of it, the icons that appear in it, and give it a window icon too (I don't think you can do any of this with the notify-osd fallback notifications).