[Q] any kind of notifications, without turning on the screen?

As most of us know our beloved Note (1) doesn't have the "notifications LED" present in so many dumber and older phones.
After completely breaking the power button from just checking if there's any notification I've got a new phone and I'm on a quest for finding some alternative notification.

So, it seems that in order to actually GET that there's some notification you need to have talkback enabled and that's buggy (you get this spooky voice when doing certain tasks). FINE, I disabled (freeze) both samsung and google TTS (although I didn't really wanted, but OK). Then I get a hand icon in the notification area with "talkback activated". Ok, FINE. I'm using Flashlight Notifier (which flashes the camera LED) and it seems to be somehow working, except that it leaves the (camera) LED turned on continuously!!!

I seems that there's some other option to flash the soft buttons backlight but it needs some very old (I think GB) ROM and I'm not going there. For what is worth I'm on a stock new JB with speedmod kernel.

In short, any solution that "just works", getting extremely frustrated with all the stupid problems I run into? I need notification for gmail, hangouts, sms, missed calls, nothing fancy.