Since Lucid, notifications are not really clear

[Nicolas Michel]

Binary package hint: empathy

Hello,

Since Lucid, empathy notifications were been merged with the e-mail ones. For a daily use, this is not so effective : we don't see well notifications. So I don't see as fast as I want when somebody talked to me.
I installed ppa of empathy, where I don't have the Ubuntu patch and have an empathy icon.

I think this is a good idea to group notifications and decrease the number of icons in the gnome status toolbar. But I think the way it is implemented is not ergonomic.

Thank you,
nm

[Nicolas Michel (nicolas-michel)]

Maybe that the letter icon should blink. Or switch slowly from letter icon to phylactery one when received a chat message.

[Brian Curtis (bcurtiswx)]

Thanks for your bug report and helping to make Ubuntu better. This is an indicator applet wishlist item and has been marked as such. Could you please provide us with a detailed description of what you think it should do?

[Nicolas Michel (nicolas-michel)]

Currently that "communication" icon is a letter. White when no notifications. Green if we received a mail or an event in empathy or both.

What it should do? Here is an idea.

There is some cases :
1) we received no mail and no new event in empathy :
the letter icon could be white as it is already implemented

2) we received some mails and no new event in empathy :
the letter icon could be green as it is already implemented

3) we received a new event in empathy but no new mail :
there is only a static green phylactery icon (we don't see the letter icon anymore)

4) we received a new event in empathy and we also received some mails :
the letter icon is green. It switches slowly to a green phylactery icon. Then fade again to a letter icon and so on (loop) until we have an other kind of event (as describes above). The transitional effect between letter icon and phylactery one could be a fade effect (the opacity of the letter icon decrease while the opacity of the phylactery one increase).

I talked about blinking icons in previous post but I find it boring for a daily use.

[Brian Curtis (bcurtiswx)]

Ubuntu is the upstream for Indicator-Applet. Marking as triaged.

[manny (estelar57)]

Also seeing this problem.

you cant distinguish importance or priority.

and you can distinguish between IM, email or other...

for IM it should at least blink as it needs immediate action/attention (unless you set status to busy).

i think this may also need an entry in the specs wiki:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MessagingMenu#Unresolved_issues

[manny (estelar57)]

>and you can distinguish between IM, email or other...

sorry i meant "Can't" distinguish.

New users also find this pretty unintuitive compared to what they were used to.