Mylyn has a nice feature where it pops up desktop notifications whenever there have been updates to subscribed tasks. Jazz and RSSOwl has a similar way of notifying the user.Work is in progress to provide a common notification API that will be available in the Eclipse platform UI. Meanwhile we can use the Mylyn commons API, in particular the org.eclipse.mylyn.commons.ui plug-in. It only have a few dependencies and should be straightforward to include into any product.

Then it’s simply a matter of subclassing AbstractNotificationPopup and implementing createContentArea(Composite parent).