The dark notifications are easy to miss on a dark desktop

Thanks for reporting that problem. We have made some precautionary steps to make this problem less awkward, for example the notification bubble colour is dark grey, rather than black, so that it still shows against black desktop background.
I find the option to customise the colour potentially very useful. It will have to be carefully considered and I'm expecting the decision to be made soon.

Here is a screenshot how it looks like for me when I get a notify for a new email.
This is with a dark theme. Using a light theme doesn't improve it much as my terminal is still black and only the title bar is in light colour.

For now we'll stay with one colour. We'll see how it works out for the users and defer any changes until we have gathered a solid feedback.

Not considered for the UIF anymore.

i have the same problem too...

compounded by the fact that i use conky , makes it even worse to differentiate...
i hope u give it serious consideration to change the color by user preference...

*** or if its not too much of a trouble, could u mention where u have the settings for the black color ?or if u use an background image, i could edit it... so that i could change it manually atleast?***

i agree.

also, i think it is problematic to introduce this notification system *without any desktop integration*. before this, almost *every* aspect of the gnome desktop was easily and globally customizeable (icon theme, gtk theme...). what was so bad about GtkTooltips?

and

it would be nice if i could configure notify-osd to display volume and brighness feedback animations at the center of the screen.

wouldnt it be easier to add a 1 or 2 pixel white border which would make the notification highlight better? atleast till the color options are available

I'll add gconf-key for a number of rendering-parameters of notify-osd (title-/body-font, bubble-bg-color, bubble-bg-opacity, text-fg-color, text-shadow-color). That will provide some flexibility.

Not only is it a problem with dark themes, it is also a problems that many people _might_ not like it. Why does it seem that modern linux moves away from configurability, forcing people the way authors feel it. "It's gonna look like that. Regardless of theme. Period." So says the spec. Doesn't it seem a bit arrogant? And why with a buitifully fitting theme do we have to have disturbing black somethings pop up as notifications? It's against everything we've been used to so far. It's irritating and you should now it. A gconf key is fine, but a clearly better solution is to allow _themes_ change that. Because that's what they are here for. Aren't they?