Griffin’s Proxi and Mail.app
This morning on TUAW 
I read about Griffin’s Proxi, which has been released as a public beta.
Griffin is using it as a utility for working with its various hardware products like the PowerMate and Radio Shark.
But the reach of the app is much wider. Proxi is in fact a kind of FastScripts / HotKeys / Growl / Quicksilver mash-up. It performs some of the functions of all those utilities, without totally replacing any of them.
Proxi comes with pre-built scripts and “blueprints” to interact with a number of apps—iChat, Mail.app, iTunes and Skype—as well as general AppleScript and application launcher abilities.
Because this is Hawk Wings, we are interested mainly in Mail.app. After the jump you will find some screenshots and two quick suggestions on how it works with Mail in useful ways.
For Mail it offers a notification system to replace utilities like iAlert, GrowlMail or MailAppetizer.
The editor offers you lots of options constructing for the format of the notification for yourself:
Click on image for a larger view
It offers pre-made fields like subject, name, account and so forth that you can drag and drop onto the screen where you want them. You also have full control over the text, colour, layout and font. A notification template can be constructed in a few minutes:
Proxi also offers a hotkeys option that can launch AppleScripts. Here it is launching the “Change SMTP Servers” script , one of Andreas Amann’s Mail Scripts , that I have to run every morning:
There is a lot more to say about Proxi. Particularly nice are the iTunes notifications.
Because you are able to control the size of the graphic in the notification of new tracks, you can get a nice big flash from the album graphic.
There is also a pre-packaged applescript for displaying the CPU load and memory usage of your apps at a single keystroke and another to append material to the clipboard.
Griffin maintains a wiki with many more tips and tricks. There is also a blog, which among other things carries a post on how to make your own Proxi plugins (if you know a bit of Cocoa).
It is still in beta, but the opportunities seem to be enormous. Download it and play with it yourself.
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April 13th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
Glad you brought that to my attention since I’d quickly ignored Proxi with the false impression it was just for controlling hardware. Definitely worth a closer look …