GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 649230
Use counters indicators in notification icons for new messages in existing chat conversations
Last modified: 2012-10-30 15:58:45 UTC
1. chat with someone 2. leave the window unfocused 3. wait for a message to come in Result: the Shell's notification will show up, and after a second it will hide. The problem is that when you look in the shell's notification area, you will see the contact's notification icon but there is no visual indication that there are new messages from that contact. Since this icon stays there indefinitely even when you have "read" the messages, you have no way to know that you have received new messages until you actually look at empathy's conversation window and notice the tiny balloon icon near the contact's name. I miss a ton of messages this way, even when I'm actively looking at the notification area. Worse: if you're chatting with multiple persons at the same time, you won't know who messaged you or not until you actually open the conversations, because the notification area doesn't make the distinction clear. This makes empathy quite hard to use. I'm allright for reducing distractions when in "busy" mode (if that's by design), but in available mode, I should be able to follow up on conversations more easily. In addition to that, the contact's icon doesn't blink in empathy's contact list window (should I file a separate bug report about that?).
This is done by the Shell, not Empathy. But I agree, the Shell should make a visual distinction between "Current conversations" and "Current conversations having unread messages". This is probably blocked by bug #644297 as the Shell will have to keep track of unacked messages. This may be the same bug as bug #641723 actually. As I said, it should be very very clear to users when they have unread messages.
*** Bug 649228 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Maybe I'm understanding the bug report incorrectly, but shouldn't there be a message counter on the tray item? This would indicate how many messages have been missed.
Allan and Guillaume: if Empathy and the Shell in 3.6 use the message counters in the notification area for conversations, I would say that this bug and bug #641723 could be marked as resolved for 3.6.
Fixed, then.