Support customizable notification aggressiveness levels for different applications

Binary package hint: indicator-applet

First, I posted this comment to #392265:

"The current (karmic) indication of the new messages in the indicator applet doesn't do its job here. The peripheral vision doesn't register any difference when a new message comes up. This is especially true if you select some dark theme like New Wave. This is even more true if you have a modern notebook (most of which are TN-film as far as I know) which is very sensitive to angles so that starting with some position light gray and dark gray just look the same. I was constantly missing notifications from Empathy and some people even got mad at me for the silence :) so I had to switch back to Pidgin with its big flashing smile.

My vote is that the icon should be flashing or jumping or glowing or such. The peripheral vision is much more sensitive to the dynamics than to the statics (here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troxler%27s_fading you will find some interesting info about that).

BTW adding good dynamics may let keep the current monochrome look and feel the developers are so picky about without negatively affecting the function."

Then I realized that different applications actually have different indication requirements.

For example, instant messaging clients are actually real-time applications; they deal with conversations that are happening just now. Obviously, the indication of events related to these conversations should be as annoying as possible because a failure to notice a new message from the other party may make people think you are ignoring them which is sometimes interpreted as very offensive. And if you try to explain that this is due to the fact that in Ubuntu we have such a notification strategy, bla-bla-bla... this will be a bad excuse.

On the other hand, the email client is a slightly different kind of application. It's sort of off-line communication where the person usually reads emails in batches when he has some free minutes and with quite significant delays in between. This makes a flashing notification for new emails inappropriate -- I don't want to get constantly and aggressively notified about new messages that I'm not going to read within the next 10 minutes anyway.

This, I think, clearly demonstrates that it is a bad idea to treat all applications equally, the way the indicator-applet does it right now. It needs a settings dialog where the user can set his notification preferences for each supported application separately: how annoying the icon should be, if and for how long he wants to see the notifications balloons and so on.

As this is not just changing the icon theme, I'm reporting it here.