IRC is a great way to communicate, but unless you sit around all day watching the screen or have headphones in to ping a sound when someone talks at you, it's easy to miss conversations. What I wanted was some way to pop up a notifier box at the bottom of the screen saying something like "you've got a new message". google searches for "gnome-notifer" didn't turn up anything great; except for a blog entry by Miguel de Icaza.
Looked like what I wanted but firstly it had a few bugs and by default left the message for 5 seconds then made it disappear. I wanted something that would leave the message until I indicated for it to disappear.
So I updated it to iron out some bugs and made it so that the message stays until you mouse over and out of it (the border changes so you know which messages are about to clear : screenshot).
