solution for notifications

[Koppányi Tamás <kornenator gmail com>]

hi!

i've been trying gnome3 with gnome-shell recently, and i have to say that it's pretty impressive, gorgeous. but there is one huge problem i have with it. i'd like to ask if such question is open for discussion here. 

namely, when i get notifications it's superb they appear in those little pop-ups, but my problem is that if i don't stare at the screen constantly, i am bound to miss something happening, because these pop-ups just disappear after a few secs, and there is absolutely nothing on the screen telling me that something happened. unless of course i manually open up the notification bar. emphasis on manually there. it would really be nice to have some icon always visible on the panel, or somewhere, which collects all urgent window states, and provides a drop-down list on click to view them. or even if there is no list, it's a big help to see at glance that there was something new going on while i wasn't paying attention. and i don't just mean messages, but also any program trying to grab focus with an urgent state of the window.

right now i feel it's really anti-productive that i have to keep opening up the notifications bar manually every time i turn aways for a moment.

thanks!