Recently Aurelien Gateau of the Canonical Desktop Experience team implemented the Message Indicator for KDE and Konversation. Now if you get messages when you're away from your computer or not looking at IRC it'll put them into the message indicator when you can happily not get distracted by them (unlike popup notifications) but can easily find them when you want to.
Nobody has pinged me, I can get on with something else
Someone has mentioned my name, but I'm busy, I can easily ignore it.
When I want to know who's been trying to get hold of me I have this handy list, clicking on a name will take you to the channel or query window.
It's all a vast improvement on the popup notifications in my opinion, but feedback is welcome. Hopefully the applet can go into kdeplasa-addons when it's ready. Other apps need patches, KMail, Kopete and Quassel seem like obvious candidates, talk to Aurelien if that seems interesting.
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unimpressed
this fails to understand what we've been doing with the system tray spec, and i do not appreciate the lack of collaboration in the development approach. we've said over and over that this is not where we want to go and have given very good reasons for that.
as such, regardless of how much you blog about it or how many times you send patches to subvert upstream sources to your downstream design, i have no interest in seeing it either kdeplasma-addons or kdebase-workspace.
grumpy grumpy
Aaron's comment has quite a negative tone so I feel I should respond.
The new system tray spec wasn't defined until quite recently. We did have a core Plasma developer at the last ubuntu summit where all this was planned, there was no mention that there would be overlap in functionality. As it is I'm happy we have a solution which works today and I look forward to what comes from Plasma in 4.4 or future versions.
I've blogged only once and never sent patches to Plasma so nyeh, sticks tongue out.
I might be missing the point
I might be missing the point somewhere, but to me, it would seem logical to see the icon in the systray only when I need to be notified. No need for a 'mail' icon when I don't have any messages waiting. Or is this possible somehow?
Not for now
That's already a major discussion point with the existing GNOME applet. We need usability feedback on this. The problem I see is that since it's a plasma widget, it may not be a good idea to make it completely invisible has it would be impossible to manipulate it when arranging your desktop.
Code
where is it mantained? playground?
Launchpad
For now you can find it on Launchpad, but I hope we can move it to kdesvn at some point.
How can you tell the
How can you tell the difference between a new email and a new ping on IRC? The two are not equivalent in priority.
Notifications
The message indicator is there to ensure you do not miss messages because you were either away from the computer or too busy. In the case of IRC, you will also receive a notification about the ping (unless you disabled it because you were busy).
Connection with activities
I love it!
This is exactly the thing I wanted for Konvi and Kopete (maybe KMail and Akregator as well, but I think Kontact handles that quite fine[1]) :]
When I read your post I imediately thought of the NEPOMUK and Plasma collaboration where they try to put as many data and control as possible in the Activities. One of the use-cases there was that all e-mail and IM messages that would fit under the "Hacking" and/or "Private" activity, would be stored, but hidden away, if the user was currently using "Work" activity. So binding contacts and channels to activities in the Message Indicator notification, would IMHO be awesome!
E.g. You could choose for every activity messages of which new contacts/channels:
* will show as pop-up (at work you probably *want* to see your work e-mail ASAP)
* will show as a discrete notification (at work you might still want to take a look at certain RSS feeds when you have time)
* will not be promoted/notified (at work you probably don't want to see notifications for messages from your private contacts, but if you look at your application, you'd still want to see them)
* will be hidden completely (at work, if you're not a coder, you probably don't want to see any trace of mailing list activity and would want those folders to be hidden until you switch to the "Hacking" activity)
[1] This being said, it might be useful for some if the same notification would be also (optionally) present in Kontact's "summary page".
API
Is this a new API? Seems like it could be part of the notifications, just with a flag to indicate that it is a human-originated message (and not something like a KTorrent download finishing.)