Always visible notifications in gnome3

I've installed Gnome3 on Ubuntu 11.04 via the ppa and it mostly works fine. However I am a bit unhappy about the notification panel being invisible. I understand the general concept of notifications being shown for a short amount of time and then you can find them again in the unobstrusive notification tray. However this neglects the use case that I did not notice the on-screen notification (e.g. talking on the phone, or having left the computer for a second or two).

So if I miss a notification I will have to check the tray to see it. Basically this means that I am checking the tray all the time for missing notifications which is really counter-productive.

Is there some way to get the notification tray to stay visible? Or to have it in the top-panel? Or any other means to see "notifications pending"?

Solution 1:

At the present moment, there is a temporary solution which comes in the form of a gnome-shell-extension. You can read more about the extension here. However, this issue of missing notification is something that is being worked on for the upcoming gnome 3.2 update which will be released in September 28th 2011.