Thunderbird Indicator Adds Folders Support

Thunderbird Indicator is an add-on for Mozilla Thunderbird which notifies you of new mail messages via Ubuntu's standard notification system and the Messaging menu. Once a new mail is received, the Messaging menu's icon turns green and a notification pops up. The Indicator Applet also provides quick access to your contacts and allows you to compose a new message.

A while ago we were telling you about a PPA that provides a package called "xul-ext-indicator" that integrates Thunderbird in the Ubuntu Messaging Menu. This is actually a Thunderbird extension packaged in a .deb so you can easily get updates.

Until now, "xul-ext-indicator" (Thunderbird Indicator extension) displayed a notification (using the Messaging Menu and NotifyOSD) for emails that arrived in your inbox so if you used filters for your emails, the extension failed to work. But a recent update fixes this so Thunderbird Indicator can now display notifications for emails received in any folder. If you want the old behavior (to only display notifications for emails arriving in your inbox), there is an option in the Thunderbird Indicator preferences:

To install Thunderbird Indicator in Ubuntu (the "fixed" version is only available for Ubuntu 11.04 for now), use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ruben-verweij/thunderbird-indicator
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xul-ext-indicator libnotify-bin

The latest version is only avilable for Ubuntu 11.04. In Ubuntu 10.10, you can try to install the 11.04 package or download this .deb I've created for Ubuntu 10.10 last week (this is the one I'm using - ignore the version number, it's actually 1.4).

Thanks to Radu for the screenshot!

Recent Notifications Applet Can Now Blacklist Applications

Recent Notifications is a GNOME applet that collects recent messages sent with libnotifiy to a notification daemon, such as notify-osd.

Just one day after we wrote about the Recent Notifications applet, it got a cool new feature but we never got to write about it because of the many news that came up this week.

The feature I'm talking about is an option to blacklist applications within the applet. For example if you get a lot of notifications in Pidgin, simply right click a Pidgin notification in Recent Notifications and select "Blacklist Pidgin" - the same goes for any application. If you want to remove an application from the blacklist, right click the Recent Notifications applet and uncheck the app you want to remove from the "Blacklist" tab:

But that's not all; the applet got no less then 8 updates since our post last week. Most of them were bug fixes, but there are also a few other minor features that were introduced, like debug messages or set the message limit.

If you didn't try Recent Notifications applet already, you really should! Add the Recent Notifications PPA and install the applet in Ubuntu using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jconti/recent-notifications
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install recent-notifications

Patched NotifyOSD Updates: Option To Place The Notifications In Different Screen Corners, Timeout Fix

(NotifyOSD displayed in the bottom-right screen corner)

You probably already know about the NotifyOSD packages patched by Leolik (Sukochev Roman) which allow you to customize the notification bubles (colors, font and so on). Well, the patched NotifyOSD PPA got an update seconds ago which adds further customizations (to which Mark Shuttleworth is completely against) such as: display the notifications in different corners of the screen and also finally fixes the timeout option which was broken since... forever in Ubuntu.

Unfortunately the GUI to configure the patched NotifyOSD was not updated with these changes so you must configure the NotifyOSD position on the screen manually. But you can use the GUI for the rest of the options so I highly recommend you use the NotifyOSD Config GUI instead of manually editing the configuration file.

But firstly, install NotifyOSD (the new patched version is only available for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx for now but hopefully the Karmic version will be updated too):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:leolik/leolik
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Then, restart NotifyOSD:

pkill notify-osd

Now, to place the notification bubbles in a different screen corner, use the following command in a terminal:

gconftool-2 -s /apps/notify-osd/gravity --type=int [number]

where is [number] can be:
1 - top-right corner
2 - middle-right
3 - bottom-right corner
4 - bottom-left corner
5 - middle-left
6 - top-left corner

For instance, to move the notification bubbles to the bottom-right corner, you would use the following command:

gconftool-2 -s /apps/notify-osd/gravity --type=int 3

You can then test the NotifyOSD bubbles using the following command:

notify-send test

Mark Shuttleworth: It's OK To Customize The NotifyOSD Appearence, But Not The Behavior

A Google Summer of Code project about NotifyOSD notification was recently brought up for discussion in the Ayatana mailing list. Unfortunately Mark Shuttleworth dismissed almost all the ideas related to NotifyOSD's behavior.

Mark agrees making a GUI you can use to set up the persistence time, UI modifications over a basic structure, font size/style, but that's it.

Here's what Mark Shuttleworth says about 'stacking' (make the bubbles dock downwards as they are initiated and start to stack up as the bubble times finish away) or a close button on NotifyOSD:

Please, no. I would urge Mirco NOT to take patches that introduce that sort of behaviour. We are trying to build clean and tested codebases, and the more alternative pathways we support, the less maintainable it becomes.

The design experience of Notify-OSD is what it is. Changing the style is one thing, changing the behaviour of the bubbles is another thing entirely. We are just NOT going to support simultaneous display, the design is queued and serialized.

So it seems the patched NotifyOSD we were telling you about a few days ago is the closest thing we're going to get for a customizable NotifyOSD (since the changes he agrees on are mostly covered by the patched NotifyOSD). But maybe someone will patch NotifyOSD even further (hint if you're a developer =) ).

Finally An Easy Way To Customize Notify OSD Notification Bubbles [Ubuntu PPA]

Notify OSD has been in Ubuntu for a long time yet for some odd reason, it never supported any kind of customizations so if you wanted to change it's color or position you had to compile it with the new settings.

But there is an Ubuntu PPA with a patched Notify OSD for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala and Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx which supports customizations via a simple text file so you don't have to compile it and can change the Notify OSD settings on the fly.

The package in the PPA also uses the old Jaunty way to display Notify OSD meaning the Notify OSD bubbles will always be displayed in the top right corner, not dynamic to allow a gap for sound notifications. But this also can be easily configured using the package in the PPA.

Read on!

To add the PPA, paste this in a terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:leolik/leolik

Then to install the new, patched Notify OSD, paste this in a terminal:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

We're almost done! We must now create an empty file in the home folder called .notify-osd so paste this in a terminal:

gedit ~/.notify-osd &

Then in the newly opened file, paste this:

slot-allocation = fixed
bubble-expire-timeout = 10sec
bubble-vertical-gap = 5px
bubble-horizontal-gap = 5px
bubble-corner-radius = 37,5%
bubble-icon-size = 30px
bubble-gauge-size = 6px
bubble-width = 240px
bubble-background-color = 131313
bubble-background-opacity = 90%
text-margin-size = 10px
text-title-size = 100%
text-title-weight = bold
text-title-color = ffffff
text-title-opacity = 100%
text-body-size = 90%
text-body-weight = normal
text-body-color = eaeaea
text-body-opacity = 100%
text-shadow-opacity = 100%

Then save the file but don't close it yet. We'll customize it!

These are the default Karmic and Lucid settings. To make Notify OSD behave like on Jaunty, meaning the notification bubble is always in the top right corner with no gap, change the "slot-allocation" value from "fixed" to "dynamic".

Then play with the rest of the values such as colors and so on. Anyone who knows some basic CSS should have no problem customizing Notify OSD now.


To try out the new Notify OSD values, type this in a terminal:

notify-send test

For more info on using notify-send to test the notifications, type:

notify-send --help

Once you're done, restart notify-osd with:

pkill notify-osd

What's still missing for Notify OSD? A GUI to customize all these settings so the user doesn't have to edit a text file anymore. Hopefully this patch will be included in Ubuntu soon. Maybe we'll even get Notify OSD themes too.

Update1: a GUI for this version of NotifyOSD has been released so after adding the PPA in this post, you can also install this NotifyOSD GUI.

Update2: An update brings option to move the NotifyOSD notification bubbles to different screen corners, timeout fix.

Special thanks for the heads up: LucidFox; credits for the patched Notify OSD which supports customization: leolik (in Russian)