Incoming chat messages not visible enough

[Guillaume Desmottes]

As the Empathy maintainer I use to use my own git version of empathy instead of the packaged one. I switched to Maverick last week and thought it would be a good time to give a new try to the Ubuntu version of Empathy, the main change comparing to upstream being the indicator patch.

My biggest concern is that you can very easily miss incoming messages. If you are looking at your screen that's fine because of the notification bubble, but if you're away for a short bit and the notification already disappeared, you can very easily miss that the small messaging icon turned green.

This fit with lot of feedback we get from Empathy Ubuntu users complaining that they often miss important messages. Changing the color of the icon is not enough, we should make it blink or something. Instant messages are more "real time" than mails, users should catch them ASAP, missing messages during a while can lead to serious issues.

[Didier Roche-Tolomelli (didrocks)]

That's a valid concern, I hear a lot of complain on the French forum about that as well.

[Cris Dywan (kalikiana)]

Something I personally expected from mockups but isn't implemented is the "me" indicator changing. So for instance instant messages are serparate from mail. The label next to it could be bold, to make it more visible.

Blinking is something I advise against because it is distracting if one intentionally needs to ignore messages temporarily.