Comment 5 for bug 694224

This lost-focus is not caused by notify-osd itself.

You can verify this by running Dylan's provided python-script and triggering lp:notify-osd/examples/icon-value.py in another terminal (with a "sleep 10" before that, so you've enough time to focus Dylan's running python-script and its output). icon-value.py is triggering the exact same type of notification that a regular volume-up/down would be made of.

What's actually stealing the focus is the process handling the multimedia-keys input. That's the media-keys-manager part (libmedia-keys.so) of lp:gnome-settings-daemon iirc.