System tray notification

[Andras Mantia]

Hi,

 I don't write a bug report, as this is not a bug in itself, just something 
that seems to be badly designed. Or maybe it is still unfinished, in that 
case ignore the mail.
 The idea of keeping the notifications visible for a longer time makes sense 
and I support it. The way how it works now (as of 29/11/2009) unfortunately 
is not good. The problem is that the notifications remain there for too long 
time. Example: you get a mail in some folder and you get notified. You read 
it. After a while you get another mail in another folder, you get notified, 
but in the notifications it appears as you'd get a mail in the first folder 
as well. But there isn't anything new, so it is misleading and confuses you, 
the user. I know, the notification item cannot know that you read a mail. 
And I know that expiring the notifications after a certain time is not that 
good, as we loose the functionality for which this was introduced: to be 
able to read the notifications later, when you have time for them.
 I have a solution, but I don't know how it will work in real life: if you 
manually click to see the notifications, when they disappear they should be 
removed completely, assuming that if you clicked on the icon to see them, 
you really read them as there is no reason keeping them "forever".
 Alternatively (or maybe together with this), I'd recommend an option, even 
if it is a hidden, config file option only, to restore the old behavior of 
clearing the notifications after they were shown (or after X minutes), so if 
it turns out that the current way is not good enough, for 4.4 we can have a 
not annoying notification area.

Andras