title: GUI design - display messages without popups
body: <p>What techniques do you use to display messages in a GUI without popup dialogs?</p>
  
  <p>Popup dialogs are generally quite horrible for a user - they get in the way and often you are not interested that you just caused an error. An alternative is just to ignore errors and do nothing</p>
  
  <p>However, there may be the occasional user who wants to know when they caused an error...</p>
  
  <p>So you want to display informative messages but without requiring that the user has to click away annoying popup boxes. </p>
  
  <p>One option could be to use a statusbar of the mainwindow, but in order for any widget to use it, you need to pass around references to this damn statusbar (I'm thinking of python/qt here)...it quickly gets confusing and removes 'resuability' of your widgets (imagine you create another app, without a statusbar and you want to reuse a widget in it...)...</p>
  
  <p>Any ideas?</p>