Notify plugin: New features, 30% discount
Sunday, July 11th, 2010
The email notification utility Notify has just been updated.
The new release comes with a slew of new features, including keyboard shortcuts, the ability to grab photos from Address Book for its Growl notifications, smarter options for message reading and handling and better support for plain text.
Notify is at the feature-rich “high end” of the spectrum for email notifiers. Like MailCue
, it is almost a mini-email client in itself.
It offers built-in support for Gmail and Google Apps, MobileMe, Rackspace and “ordinary” IMAP accounts:

The interface is minimal and well-crafted, offering options to read, delete or move messages in the menubar drop-down pane:

Buttons across the top recheck the account, launch the message in the webmail client or offer a full preview in Notify.
This new release (2.1.3) adds support for keyboard shortcuts but they are not — as far as I could see — documented. This leads to much fun with guessing and trial and error.
Preferences allow the user to set defaults for frequency of checking and message handling:

It also integrates with Growl, which does the heavy lifting for the notifications themselves.
The notifications comes in the style of Growl’s “smoky glass” Bezel.
Some people swear by the productivity and focus gains of using notifiers rather than email clients to monitor email traffic.
I am not entirely convinced. I remain a great fan of Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero
approach (he’s writing a book!
), with its stress on reducing the intrusiveness of email checks in your work. In my experience, he is right that,
“always on” email checkers have a tendency not only to blow a lot of unnecessary time and attention on scanning the horizon, but that the quality of their resulting email work often suffers.”
Still, if you have a cast-iron will and you’re looking for a notification utility, this one is nice.
Notify is shareware and is available from the developer’s web site
. It normally costs USD 10, but is currently on sale for 30% less.
Of course, mail.appetizer
also creates lovely notifications and is now (in beta form) compatible with 10.6.4. And it’s donationware.
Tags: GMAIL, growl, inbox zero, keyboard shortcuts, menubar, mobileme, notification, Productivity

Syncman 1.1 can now be configured to run as a menubar utility and to load automatically when you fire up Mac OS X. 

OmniGroup are really pounding away at
The app now has a comprehensive system of alerts about tasks that due soon.
Other aspects are constantly being improved, in particular the Perspective options, which provide pre-sets for filtering your tasks in user-customisable ways.
It adds a menubar item with the date and/or the time, replacing the default System date/time display. Clicking on it opens a drop-down box with the current month, and a list of events and tasks for the day which can be toggled on and off. 
A keyboard shortcut pops up a “heads up display” for creating a new task. I find it easier to use that the list of to-dos in Mail (subject for another post, but why are Mail’s to-do features so underdone?!).
Logan Rockmore’s excellent menubar notification utility, Mail Unread Menu has been updated and now offers much more control for users over the mailboxes it will track.
Mac OS X Tips UK
The menubar notification utility, Mail Unread Menu has been updated.
The latest update to Mail Unread Menu has a changed application icon and will now correctly set Mail.app to work with bundles if these settings are not already enabled.