Hannes Bretschneider has written a script that displays notifications about newly arrived mail on the Desktop using the GeekTool utilty.

GeekTool is a Preference Pane utility that can pipe the result of Unix commands, scripts and other things onto the Desktop. There are many ways to use it. For example, Lifehacker journo Gina Trapani uses it to pipe her plain text to-do files onto her Desktop.

Hannes’ script grabs the sender and subject line of new messages. When a GeekTool entry is created for it:

It outputs the results to the Desktop:

Like all GeekTool outputs, the font face, point size, position on the Desktop and many other options can be set in the GeekTool Preference Pane.

This elegant notification solution runs in the background and avoids the need to use another notification utility.

On the other hand, in order to get the most of out it, you need to be able to see your Desktop. I can’t remember when I last saw mine.mail.app, apple mail, notification, plugin, geektool, script, new mail

Similar Posts:

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• MailFX: New Mail Notifier for Mail.app
• Secrets is back: Clever Preference tweaking
• Google Reader Notifier: Menubar alerts, previews

Tags: Apple Mail, geektool, mail.app, new mail, notification, plugin, Script

This entry was posted on Sunday, 25th March, 2007 at 12:16 am and is filed under Apple Mail, Productivity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.