Created attachment 188338 [details]
The extension I had to install to get reasonable communication

I enjoy using Gnome Shell, especially visually pleasing, but I think how it handles messages is problematic to say the least. Here some serious problems I have.

1.

I want to get notified of incoming chat messages but I am really confused about this functionality in Gnome Shell/Gnome 3 (I'm using Fedora 15 RC).

So there is an incoming chat message and I get a notification in the message tray for a couple of seconds and then it disappears. If I move my mouse cursor to the lower right corner of the screen, empathy is blinking, signaling that I have a new message. So far, so good.

But what if I don't watch my screen for a couple of seconds or minutes and miss the notification? When I tested this there was no reminder popping up regulary to notify me that I got a new message. This means that every time after I return from let's say getting a cup of coffee from the kitchen, I have to move the cursor to the lower right corner of my screen to check on the empathy status.

And what If I'm concentrating on an another task I'm doing with my computer and somehow don't catch the message tray notification? Being afraid of that I have to move my cursor to the lower right corner every couple of minutes to have a look whether I overlooked an incoming message. Really, who wants to do that? 

In Gnome 2 the empathy/pidgin icon started to blink whenever I got a new message, so if I returned from let's say the kitchen I saw instantly that someone was trying to contact me. Now, these messages simply get lost!


If I'm contacted via chat, I want to react immediately - and not 5 or 10 minutes later when I notice that I was contacted. By then, my chat partner might be gone - not everyone is sitting by his or her computer all day to talk to someone in 5 or 10 minutes intervals. 

I had to install an extension to place the empathy icon on the upper panel, where I can set it to blink on incoming messages. (There is no setting to make the message tray visible at all time or get regular reminders of incoming messages at all in Gnome Shell!) 

2.

A chat window now takes a lot more clicks to use.

In Gnome 3, whenever I get an incoming notification, a small integrated chat window pops up from beneath where I can instantly write my answer (If I notice the incoming message). That's good, but when I type in that integrated window, my chat partner doesn't get a typing notification. Neither does my window show that he/she is typing. This functionality is needed so we can type our messages one after another and not talk over each other.

I have to click on that little integrated window again, so that the actual empathy chat window can pop up! There I can write messages that have a typing notification for my chat partner and I can see him/her typing too.

Problem is,if I'm doing something else on my computer too and the chat window gets out of focus, it simply disappears (my guess is, to the message tray), and I can only get it back if I click on the message tray again (alt+tab doesn't show the window). So every time I want to answer I have to click on the message tray to show the integrated chat window and then another click on taht to show the actual empathy chat windwo and only THEN I can type a message that has a typing notification for my chat partner! Very inconvenient! Even worse, in Pidgin, if the chat window gets out of focues it just dispappears and you can't get it back!


These issues make using Gnome Shell for chat communication very very unpleasant.