OmniGroup are really pounding away at the public beta of OmniFocus. Every day, sometimes more than once a day, they push out a new build with tweaks, bugfixes and improvements.

Today, a new feature appeared that is worth a blog post.

The app now has a comprehensive system of alerts about tasks that due soon.

It offers the option to display these alerts in the Dock, where like Mail.app’s little red bubble, they serve as a constant reminder that fooling around on facebook all day will not result in Getting Things Done.

Right-clicking the Dock icon brings up a summary of the upcoming tasks, listed by context.

Alerts in the menubar provide another option for a visual prompt about outstanding tasks.

Here, a drop-down menu also lists the tasks by context. Clicking on one, opens OmniFocus at the appropriate place in the app’s Context View.

Other aspects are constantly being improved, in particular the Perspective options, which provide pre-sets for filtering your tasks in user-customisable ways.

For example, I can set a Perspective that shows me only tasks related to my day job that are due in the next three days. OmniFocus creates a button for that Perspective which I can then place in the app’s Toolbar for easy access.

Syncing with iCal is more trouble-free than it was two days ago and the Kinkless Importer is much more stable and reliable.

In other OmniFocus news, Ethan Schoonover writes in the comments on another post:

For what it’s worth, we at Omni are all very interested in getting OmniFocus content on the iPhone (The Omni Group is pretty much 99% iPhone users, so we have a dog in this fight). Rest well assured that as soon as we have options for doing this in a way that allows reasonable functionality, we’ll be on it.

Fingers crossed! getting things done, GTD, omnifocus, alerts, notifications, dock, menubar, ical, kinkless, productivity

OmniGrowl is described by its developer as “an expandable framework for sending Growl Notifications for applications that do not natively support Growl”.

(Growl is a pop-up notification system for OS X that installs itself as a Preference Pane. Depending on how you work, Growl can either enhance your productivity or distract you to death.)

Once installed, users can set it through Growl’s main preferences to provide alerts from iCal, Address Book, iTunes, power status changes (battery or AC), RSS feed alerts, SMART hard-drive failure reports, alerts from Software Update and more.

It offers a full range of options for iCal alerts, each of which can be set independently or even switched-off altogether: Alerts for iCal events in one hour, 30 minutes or 10 minutes, alerts for all-day events and to-dos the day before.

Alerts can also be set for birthdays stored in Address Book and iCal.

In deference to GrowlTunes and other modules which display iTunes track changes, its iTunes settings are turned off by default. Still, the developer includes it as a way of making OmniGrowl a comprehensive app and potentially to reduce the number of apps one needs to run.

It can also display hourly alerts from RSS feeds. CNN, BBC and The New York Times are included by default, but the interface makes it easy to add extra feeds (up to 16 in total) that you particularly want to keep an eye on.

A recent update adds support for AFP alerts, “a pretty specialized need” that lets you know when AFP users connect or disconnect to your computer.

If you live in Canada (oddly the home of a disproportionate number of Mail.app-related developers), it now also tells you about local concerts and events by polling the Canadian OnTour web site.

It is open source and designed with customisation in mind (source code and some instructions included).

OminGrowl is donation-ware and available from the developer’s web site .productivity, notifications, ical, address book, itunes, growl, alerts, rss,

Inspired by the tips on creating sound files at celsius1414 , Carla has written an excellent step-by-step tutorial on setting up spoken notifications in Mail.app using one of Mac OS X’s built-in speech capabilities.

She walks through creating the aiff files using the say command, where to store them and how to attach them to rules to pick out the emails that you especially need to know about.

For her it’s all about staying attentive to the important things at work:

I need to be hyperaware of instant activity in Jabber, email, and in many different web locations. If I’m not, I’m not helping our customers to their full due, nor immediately attentive of co-workers’ needs and questions.

The main issue is email — I need to know when email’s work-related, and when such email is from supervisors.

Check out the tutorial on her web site or on MacGeekery .email, mail.app, apple mail, notification, alerts, spoken word, aiff, speech, tips

Logan Rockmore has updated his Mail Unread Menu app, a menubar utility that offers discreet notifications for your Mail.app messages.

A count of new mail in the menubar treads the thin line between over-bearing notification and no notification at all.

Logan has added a drop-down menu with options to jump to the readme file or the app’s preferences.

In addition since I last looked, it can now count new messages in either your Inbox or all your folders, making it much more flexible:

Mail Unread Menu is freeware (donations not refused) and is available from Logan’s web site .notification, plugins, mail.app, apple mail, new mail, alerts

A poster on macOSXHints offers a way to increase the relative volume of Mail.app’s new mail sound.

It is complicated. The tip involves digging around in Mail’s package, extracting the audio files, adjusting their volume in an audio editing app and then replacing them.

Rob Griffiths (macOSXHints editor) recommends the freeware Audacity for the editing; the original poster favours Peak (shareware — USD 599. Eeek! Lite edition only USD 129).

mail.app, apple mail, tips, hacks, alerts, sound files

Google has expanded and renamed its Gmail Notifier app so that it includes alerts and reminders from Google Calendar.

The revised app, now called Google Notifier, adds two icons to your menubar:

In the Preferences you can set which email client to use for composing messages, whether to display an unread message count and to receive pop-up alerts.

The Gcal pane offers similar options for your calendar events.

The email alerts are elegant and give you the sender, subject and a brief excerpt from each incoming email:

UPDATE: As Arsen points out in the comments, the new app has some rough edges. The endless loop of authentication requests can be short-circuited by turning the Gcal notifications off. Not ideal. Rather defeats the point of the updated app. No doubt a fix is on the way.

Google Notifier is freeware and is available from the Google site .

[Thanks for the prompt, Sander.]gmail, Google, email in general, gcal, notifier, notifications, alerts, menubar

Two months ago, Hawk Wings posted about an iCal hack for using Growl to display its alerts. It was clever, complicated and sacrificed the ability to email alerts.

Thomas Aylott has improved on the hack , writing a smarter script that enables Growl notifications by default, but which preserves the ability to email alerts as normal.

It is still complicated and involves digging around in the iCal package, replacing scripts. If you like that kind of thing and you like Growl, you will want to try it out for yourself.ical, growl, notifications, alerts, hacks, applescript, productivity