It’s been a long ride, but support for the messaging indicator for Liferea has finally landed in Maverick, backported to version 1.6.3.

There is now a separate PPA for those wishing to try and test this version on Lucid, rather than the unstable 1.7. One major difference between the version that went in and the 1.7 version in my PPA is that the now-official Maverick version never sets the attention flag (the “green envelope”). To quote Ken VanDine:

I don’t think liferea should set draw-attention at all, the intention of that is for important messages that need somewhat immediate attention. I think of RSS feeds as rather passive, read them when you can as opposed to an IM that might require a response within a few minutes. Setting draw-attention everytime liferea refreshes will make that property less effective for IMs, calls, emails, etc.

Meanwhile, I have patched the Epiphany web browser to replace the download notification area icon with a custom indicator. One more step towards doing away with the tray.