A few months ago I wrote a gnome-shell extension that shows how many conversations with unread messages you have, so that I could stop missing incoming messages.
I updated the extension so it now works better and it can also show what the incoming notifications are when you press the icon. You can get the new version (and install it with just two clicks) from extensions.gnome.org. If you previously installed the extension from git and you don’t have an update button on that page it could mean you need to first manually remove ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/message-notifier@shell-extensions.barisione.org/ and reload the shell (ALT-F2 and then type “r”).
Note that the extension shows the number of conversations with new messages and not the number of messages; I don’t like seeing “2” up there if somebody just wrote me “hi” and then “how are you?”.
There is still a major problem with the extension. I wanted to be able to also see if somebody pinged me on IRC (I’m a XChat-GNOME user) so I don’t limit the count to active chat conversations, but I consider all the active notifications. I find this very useful to avoid missing something, but it means that the red icon will also appear every time banshee or rhythmbox change song. Suggestions on how to solve this?
Changing completely topic, I recently moved to a new home and, having a nice new kitchen (with dishwasher), I started cooking a lot again. I decided to start a new cooking blog called gnocchialpesto.co.uk to keep track of my recipes and share them with others. If you like food, in particular Italian one, take a look at it 
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Marco Barisione's blog 
Isn’t there some kind of hint that a rhythmbox song change is less important than a conversation? If there isn’t, maybe the spec should be improved.
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Thank you again! very much!
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Hi, I use gnome-terminal weechat to IRC. Installed a plugin for weechat http://www.weechat.org/scripts/source/stable/notify.py.html/ when it comes to several notification. The Extensions of shows “1” http://dl.dropbox.com/u/61252137/ wee-notify.png
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i’m sorry, this works links http://dl.dropbox.com/u/61252137/wee-notify.png
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You could just filter on the source title, with a blacklist of “known noisy” sources.
BTW, thanks for writing the message-notifier — I’ve actually used it as the basis for a hardware “Orb” style notifier:
https://github.com/mibus/MessageOrber-gnome-shell
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Many thanks Marco for the extension; it plugs what I consider the single biggest flaw in the GS UX. However, I noticed that with the current release this extension counts all notification rather than just IM ones. I must admit that for my purposes this makes it more or less unusable. Now if I plug in an external media, the notification icon appears (not very useful since I know I just plugged in an SD card), but also it stays until the media is removed. Some sort of preference to select which kinds of notifications to count would be useful.
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Reimplementing appindicators vol II
just make a g-s bridge for them and be happy
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@bishop:
appindicators are disabled on other distros, so they are useless.
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