Everyone already knows there is plenty of nice bling in Unity and we love it. Well now we can get a little more, in the form of information displayed on top of the launcher icons.
This is a very simple addition that looks nice and adds useful information where it is easily visible without having to focus the application. This is done using the new Launcher API in libunity.
Using this simple API, I added the unseen message count to the Unity launcher in xchat-indicator. We’ll get similar support in empathy and evolution soon. The API currently includes support for adding a count, progress bar, and quicklists.
If you want to try it out in xchat or xchat-gnome, packages are available in Natty. Simply install xchat-gnome-indicator for xchat-gnome or xchat-indicator for xchat and enable the message indicator plug-in in the preferences. You will get message notifications in the messaging menu as well as the count in the Unity launcher.
