The NotifyOSD in Ubuntu does a good job in providing a growl like notification bubble when new event arrive. This is useful if you are always on your computer. If you leave your PC and new notification appears and gone, you won’t be able to know that what you have missed when you return. Recent Notification is a useful applet designed to solve this problem.
Recent Notification works hand in hand with NotifyOSD. It records down all the events notified via NotifyOSD. With a single click, you will be able to view the list of all the past events.
To install in Ubuntu,
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jconti/recent-notifications sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install recent-notifications
To use it, you have to right click on the panel and select “Add to Panel” From the window that pop up, select “Recent Notification”.
You should now see a new applet in your Gnome panel.
Simply click the applet and it will show a window with all your past notifications.
Viewing, sorting and managing your notification
In addition to viewing your recent notification, you can also get it to only show notification from a particular application. For example, I have notification coming from both Pidgin and CloudSN. In the Recent Notification window, I can select from the dropdown list to get it to show only notification from CloudSN.
For each notification, you can also right click to copy the text or to blacklist the application (so that it won’t appear in the list).
Wrapping up
Recent Notification applet is simple, and useful application designed to do what the NotifyOSD can’t. It might not be suitable for everyone, especially those who hate the idea of cluttering the taskbar with yet another applet. For those who like to keep track of the notified events, this is definitely a nifty app to have. Things that I hope to see is the availability of an indicator-applet (rather than a panel applet), or better still, integrate with the messaging menu.
What do you think?
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