Comment 4 for bug 534485

The reason Mac OS X/iPhone OS has red badges is simple: The badges should attract attention to the application. This is not equivalent to the 'selected item' background/foreground colour pair found in GTK+ themes.

I can see three ways to improve the current situation:

1. in the short term an option for setting the background colour could be added so that a user could --- through gconftool or gconf-editor --- change the colour of the badge. A sane default (e.g. a highly saturated red/orange) could be preset.

2. Alternatively, in the mid-term you could take the GTK theme colour for 'selected items' as a starting point, and modify the Saturation and Brightness values so that the badge is clearly visible.

3. While not related to Docky, in the longer term, a revamped theme spec might include 'warning' field background and foreground colours which could be used for Docky's badges.