Comment 24 for bug 449260

What is the rationale for not blinking? It seems that most people want it, and if Empathy is going to be the new default IM client for Ubuntu, it should default to what people find usable. I'm getting the impression that a blinking icon is perceived as an eyesore by interface designers. Partially agreed; it is not a 'pleasant' thing to see on the screen. But, it is not meant to be; many of the responses here indicate that users *want* their attention grabbed immediately.

I work with 2 other developers in separate locations, and we are all using Ubuntu. We kept missing important instant messages from each other because Empathy's indicator was too subtle. We use instant messaging for time-sensitive questions and so we had to switch to Pidgin for its blinking message indicator.

It would be incredibly distracting to my workflow if I needed to consistently remind myself to check the message indicator for new instant messages. This is bad default behavior; it assumes that users have the luxury of waiting to respond to instant messages and it seems to enforce a workflow where people have to interrupt themselves needlessly, rather than give users the choice to only be interrupted when they actually need to be. We all use instant messaging slightly differently, but it seems like this non-blinking indicator caters to a very specific user, perhaps one that gets bombarded with unimportant instant messages. It's clear that this leaves quite a few users disappointed.