How to get better Skype notifications in Ubuntu?

Question

In Ubuntu, I want to be notified in a customizable way when someone speaks in a Skype conversation (but not in group Chat 'channels').

The problem is:

• I have lots of windows open, so I often don't notice when a new one appears in the taskbar, or if its icon changes.
• The built-in Skype notifications are tiny, and disappear almost immediately, so I don't notice them
• I tried using this script in the Skype notification options, but it also disappears too quickly: notify-send "%sname:" "%smessage" -i skype-chat
• I tried using pidgin instead of Skype, in the hope its notifications would be better, but it is missing too many features, e.g. listing bookmarked chats above my contact list

Is there some better notifications package I can use instead of notify-send?

Or some other solution?

Answer 1

xfce4-notifyd has an option to set its theme, transparency, and time before it disappears.

I personally had to uninstall the previous notify daemon to set the new one as default...

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If you're using notify osd (gnome-notify), GUI tools to customise it can be found here.

Answer 2

I had a similar complaint, and what I ended up doing was installing this API plugin, which allowed me to add a Skype account to Empathy. Now I get my Skype messages in a nice Empathy popup, and I disabled my skype popups. One caveat, leave the Skype popups for incoming calls, as Empathy can't handle those. At least, it can't on my Fedora install.

Note: I'm operating under the assumption that Ubuntu Empathy works somewhat similar to Fedora Empathy. Please correct me if I'm wrong.