Use the Messaging indicator instead of a custom one

[Adrien Plazas]

Why not using the messaging indicator for your app instead of your own indicator ?
Could it be added at least as an option ?

[Jason Conti (jconti)]

The messaging indicator is a option I have considered, however it only displays alerts and short lines of text, so it can only augment another full app that actually displays the notifications. A similar idea is being explored in the unity directory of the recent-notifications bzr branch that uses the new features of the unity launcher to display message counts (probably broken at the moment).

The issue is that the panel applet is now deprecated since gnome 3 only supports them in fallback mode, and oneiric won't even have it installed by default so I am left with considering a variety of other options. One idea is the indicator, which should be able to support most of the functionality of the panel applet, although displaying large numbers of notifications will be difficult without filling the screen.

Another option is that with gnome 3, notification-daemon has gained functionality similar to recent notifications, and it may be better to submit patches to improve that code.

It would be relatively easy to add messaging indicator support to the recent-notifications unity code, but after experimenting with it during the natty cycle, I just think having a full app just to display notifications is overkill. I am more than happy to help out and answer questions if someone else wants to work on it though.

[Adrien Plazas (kekun-plazas)]

I think elementary OS need a notification log, maybe how you implemented it, maybe not, but if you want to design it with us, it would be a pleasure. =)
See this : https://blueprints.launchpad.net/elementaryos/+spec/notifications-log

[Roland (Rolandixor) Taylor (rolandixor)]

Please keep the indicator. I need this for Unity (and I use it on Natty). I'm upgrading to 11.10 this week, and if I don't have this I'll be unhappy :(.