Comment 1 for bug 764891

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Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote : Re: Notification of message is not visible enough. Some testing paryticipants did not notice when they received a message.

Four interface elements changed when someone mentioned the test participant's name in XChat Gnome: (1) the Ubuntu button went blue, (2) the XChat Gnome launcher icon got an emblem, (3) the envelope icon went blue, and (4) a notification bubble appeared. I counted 2/6 participants noticing any of these changes. (Though maybe others were sent the notification, and even I didn't see it!:-) Of those two, one of them noticed the launcher item emblem a while after the message arrived, when the launcher next became visible. The other saw and commented on the notification bubble, and then commented on the blue Ubuntu button and envelope. I don't know whether he would have looked for and noticed the other changes without the notification bubble appearing first.

The position and size of the messaging menu makes it most suitable for *non-urgent* notification of, and access to, new messages, with e-mail as the main use case. It has never been intended as the only, or even the primary, notification of urgent messages like those in a chat program. So I don't think it's reasonable to request that it start pulsing to better cater for urgent messages. If it did, people would likely turn it off altogether.

What alternative solutions did you consider, and how did they compare? For example, here are six possible solutions that don't involve the messaging menu at all. Probably there are others:
1. Change the launcher so that an item bounces or spins whenever it gets an emblem, and whenever the emblem changes.
2. Change the launcher so that an item bounces or spins when a window requests attention.
3. Change the Notify OSD bubble appearance, including making the bubbles subtly animated.
4. Make the launcher visible by default, so that emblems are more noticable.
5. Change the color of launcher emblems, to make them more noticable.
6. Add an option to XChat Gnome, on by default, to play a pleasant sound whenever your name is mentioned.