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Accepted
Ramon Suarez
Asked: 2013-01-11 06:28:55 +0800 CST

Full screen or more visible Skype, Pidgin, Empathy notifications?

  • 772

I work in a shared office and I have the heaphones plugged in in order not to bother my colleagues with the poping sounds of chats and incoming calls. The problem is that I miss most of my calls and chats because the current alerts are just to hard to notice.

Is there a way to make...

  • the full screen flicker,

  • or to bring up an obnoxious message right in the middle of the screen,

  • or a full status bar blink while not focused on the messaging-calling

    app so that I will not miss the calls?

I've gone through the full dconf-editor without finding anything helpful.

There may be a good lead here: How to make Skype use notify-osd? but I don't know how to take advantage of it to change the notifications.

There's a USB key with changing lights project but it does not work with Linux. Besides, why add another hardware piece when you can just put it in the interface you are looking too?

This is not a whitelisting problem, all my apps show in the tray.

skype

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    This will implement your second suggestion. An obnoxious message right in the middle of the screen.

    Go to Skype -> Options -> Notifications.

    Click the Advanced View

    Click for example the Chat Message Received event.

    Now enter the following at the Execute the following script:

    zenity --info --text "Text message from %sname."

    Click Apply and Test Event to test whether an info box appears in the middle of the screen.

    You can repeat this option for other events.

    Skype window

    For Pidgin the same can be achieved using any of the execute plugin command plugins.

    • 5

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

    It logs all notifications that show up on your screen – whether you act on them or not.

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

    At OMG!Ubuntu you can read a blog post about it: [How to] Never Miss an Ubuntu Notification

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