Comment 22 for bug 392265

My 5 cents: the current (karmik) 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.