Question: I am rather new to Unity, I have only started using it after upgrading to 11.10 several days ago, and one thing really worries me. I started to miss incoming messages in Empathy and Skype because sometimes I'm not there when they arrive. And when I'm back, I don't use the launcher because I have a maximized window, so I don't see that there are windows requesting my attention.

Is there a way to make the launcher remind me of such windows? Or maybe make it stick them out halfway like it does when an event happens and keep them like that until I click on them?

Answer: 
You can use [Recent Notifications Indicator](https://launchpad.net/recent-notifications) for catching up missed notifications. It will display a postbox icon in your notification area.

To install, use the following commands:

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

```

To start the indicator you have to restart Unity. The simplest way to do this is just to *log out and log back in*.

Once you have any incoming notifications, the icon turns from „white” to green and you can use its pull down menu to review the messages.
This seems to be a empathy user interface bug as Pidgin does not exhibit the same behaviour. Also try following this guide [Pidgin Skype](http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/04/run-skype-as-a-daemon-and-manage-it-from-empathy-in-ubuntu-11-04/) to integrate Skype messages into the messaging menu so you don't miss those either