the softwares launched from the unity-panel often don't get focus as they should

closing old bug

Not sure why this was closed --- the behavior still exists. Often, after launching an application from the Unity launcher, the new window fails to take the focus. I'm guessing this is related to the window manager's focus stealing prevention feature (which is at its default setting), but presumably the launcher should be able to coordinate with the window manager so that newly launched windows do get the focus. It seems this doesn't currently work reliably.

Certain combinations of (currently focused, new) windows seem more likely than others to exhibit this bug. For example, if the currently focused window is a Gnome Terminal and the newly opened window is a Nautilus (home folder) window, the Nautilus window always fails to get the focus.

don't reopen old closed bugs, the specific issue reported there stopped happening, the ones you described are tracked in different bugs already no need to reopen this one

Apologies for following the wrong process. It is true that the part about the launcher not "claiming attention" does seem to be fixed --- the icon does "wiggle" briefly even if the window fails to take the focus.

For my benefit, and that of future bug reporters who may come across this report, what is the correct bug number that is currently tracking the other part of this issue (windows not taking the focus when launched from the unity launcher)?

Ah, I see that the issue is now tracked in bug 627195.

(For some reason this didn't show up when I searched, but does show up near the top when simply browsing the unity bug list.)

right, that's one of the issues, some bugs about focus issues are assigned to compiz as well