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Notify plugin: New features, 30% discount

Tim Gaden — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 22:34:10 +0000

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.Similar Posts:

Syncman 1.1: Address Book-Gmail sync app gets new features

Tim Gaden — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:37:15 +0000

The recent 10.5.3 update introduced built-in syncing with Gmail Contacts in Address Book.

Despite this, developers of third-party Address Book-Gmail syncing apps are soldiering on. Both SpanningSync and Syncman developers point out that 10.5.3 offers this only for Leopard users and, even then, only for Leopard users with an iPhone or iTouch device.

Jeff Nichols, Syncman developer, has just released a new improved version of his sync app, lending credence to his claim that Wateree (his software firm) is a “small and agile company that can adjust quickly to our customers needs and desires”.

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

Behind the scenes further tweaks have improved the way Google Talk address are mapped to Jabber addresses in Address Book, and improved treatment of how Address Book’s Last Name field is handled.

But the number one request of users was for scheduled syncing, and Syncman delivers on that too.

The Preferences allow you to set the period of the sync and to customise the level of confirmation you want before it makes any changes:

Confirmation is another nice feature of Syncman, that is lacking in Address Book’s default sync option. As Jeff puts it:

Syncman respects the effort you’ve put into maintaining your Address Book, and therefore gets your confirmation before making any changes that could potentially cause you a whole bunch of headache.

So Syncman offers a confirmation dialog displaying potential changes before it makes them:

SpanningSync has also recently launched a 2.0 beta of its software, which is addition to syncing iCal and Google Calendar, will also sync Address Book data, including photos (Syncman is promised to have this feature soon too). The beta is free (but is a beta, so backup!).

SpanningSync costs either USD 25 for a year’s subscription or USD 65 for a once-off, unlimited licence.

Syncman is shareware and costs USD 15 (€9.95). You can get a 30-day free demo from Wateree’s web site. address book, gmail, google calendar, syncing, menubar, contacts, scheduling, nimble agile developersSimilar Posts:

OmniFocus’ new tricks: Notifications, iPhone syncing

Tim Gaden — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 11:50:49 +0000

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 itâ€™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, weâ€™ll be on it.

Fingers crossed! getting things done, GTD, omnifocus, alerts, notifications, dock, menubar, ical, kinkless, productivitySimilar Posts:

MenuCalendarClock: Slick new to-do management features for Leopard

Tim Gaden — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 12:54:22 +0000

MenuCalendarClock is a menubar app for iCal that gives you quick access to your iCal events and to-dos. Another menubar app, High Priority, had the jump on it in Tiger, as High Priority offered the ability to create new to-dos and mark tasks as completed.

Now, the new Leopard-friendly MenuCalendarClock 3.0 offers the same interaction with to-dos. There are no plans to rewrite High Priority for Leopard, so MenuCalendarClock is worth another look.

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.

Hovering over the calendar displays a tooltip containing that day’s events.

The Action wheel opens a menu with options to reveal a search field, copy today’s date into the clipboard, display the app’s preferences and more.

MenuCalendarClock is also very well provided with keyboard shortcut. By default Control-Option-Command-C pops down the display, although the combination can be set by the user in the preferences.

A further option in the preferences enables a tooltip display of the days events and to-dos when the mouse is hovered over the menubar item.

The Preference Pane controls options for general display, customising the font and colour of the time display and the choice of a number of icons.

Further options allow you to set which iCal calendars it should display and options for dealing with the birthdays of your Address Book contacts.

New in the latest version is the ability to create tasks and to edit and mark them as complete. Needless to say this passes through seamlessly into iCal and Leopard Mail’s new to-do lists.

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?!).

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like one can tab through the fields in the display, which is a pain. Also I find that I can associate a to-do with any of my iCal calendars in MenuCalendarClock, something I can’t do in Mail.app. The to-do icons are colour-coded to the particular iCal calendar. The option to colour the text of the to-do as well would be nice.

Highlighting a task, pressing Command-I to bring up the Inspector allows existing to-dos to be edited, Shift-Command-C marks it as complete. It’s fast and it’s easy to master.

MenuCalendarClock costs USD 19.95 to register. You will need to buy a licence to access the to-do management features, although some basic features can be used when it is unregistered. Also, it does the job in English, German, Finnish, French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, Russian, Norwegian, Japanese and Simplified Chinese.

Get it from the developer’s web site .leopard, ical, menubar, task management, productivity, mail.app, calendar, to-dos, eventsSimilar Posts:

Mail Unread Menu: Menubar notification app gets smarter

Tim Gaden — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 11:43:19 +0000

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.

Mail Unread Menu works with Leopard (which will be handy) and also features a new exclusions list in its preferences where you can specific mailboxes for the app to ignore.

This is a concentration boost of the first order. For example, in the screenshot below, I have added the mailboxes for two mailing lists:

Because Mail Unread now ignores, it only reports emails that might actually need a response from me, not emails that prefer to browse when it suits me.

Mail Unread Menu is donation-ware and available from Logan’s web site .mail.app, apple mail, menubar, notification, plugin, unread messages, productivitySimilar Posts:

Get more out of Google Notifier

Tim Gaden — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 11:58:18 +0000

Mac OS X Tips UK has written up a list of tips to wring the most out of the menubar helper for Google services like Gmail and Google Calendar.

It shows you how to set the default number of messages displayed using the hidden Defaults Editor.

You can also set the Notifier to display only email matching a particular label in the same way.

Of course, the Defaults Editor just a fancy GUI to Notifier’s preferences file — com.google.GmailNotifier — stored in your ~/Library/Preferences folder, which you can edit directly with Proprty List Editor or any text editor.

The list also mentions Gmail+Growl , a plugin for Google Notifier that passes notification of new messages to the Growl alert system .Gmail, google, calendar, menubar, notification, not apple mail, not mail.app, email, tipsSimilar Posts:

Mail Unread Menu 2.0.3: Menubar notification

Tim Gaden — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 12:58:00 +0000

The menubar notification utility, Mail Unread Menu has been updated.

Notification utilities comes in two basic flavours.

One style, the full-on “splash screen” approach, is best done by Mail.appetizer and GrowlMail .

Both of these interrupt your work to let you know about new mail:

The second style is more discreet. Mail Unread Menu and MailUnreadStatusBar sit in the menubar, counting away as new mail arrives but not disrupting your work.

Myself, I prefer the latter.

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.

It is also smarter about displaying the count in the Inbox, although as you can see in the screenshot it doesn’t tell you which inbox is which if you have it set to display the unread count in “All Mailboxes” in the preferences.

Take the new version and MailUnreadStatusBar for a test run and make up your own mind which one works best for you.mail.app, apple mail, plugins, notification, menubar, pop-up, splashSimilar Posts:

JABMenu 1.2: International maps, group emails, more

Tim Gaden — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 12:53:02 +0000

Jonathan Nathan has updated his menubar access utility for Address Book, JABMenu.

The newest version (1.2) adds more options for international map services, the ability to compose an email to a group of contacts found through its look-up hotkey, the ability to add contact info into the foremost application (i.e. quickly insert contact details into a mail.app message—very handy!) and more.

Since I don’t have many friends in Desmoines, Iowa or Martha’s Vinyard, the increased number of international mapping options is very welcome.

People can now benefit from a much wider range of country-specific Google Maps services and mapping providers.

It works well too.

Clicking on the postal address of everyone’s favourite company (or at least its Australian outpost) pops up the right result (plus a slightly scary suggestion):

The new group email option is also useful, allowing you to select multiple contacts from a look-up search:

You can read the full changelog on Jonathan’s web site , where you can also download the updated version. It’s shareware (USD 10).address book, menubar, productivity, mail.app, apple mail, plugins, maps, saving time, googleSimilar Posts:

Google Reader Notifier updated again (and again)

Tim Gaden — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 10:30:23 +0000

Google Reader Notifier’s developer Troels Bay has been busy. Since I last posted about his menubar utility for Google’s newfeed reader just over a week ago, he’s updated it twice.

The newest version (0.37) released today adds a “Mark all as read” option to the drop-down menu, puts newest articles on the top of the list and adds an icon to show when your connection to Google Reader is lost.

The previous update, earlier in the week, added the ability to turn off the sound notification and the option to display between five and fifty items in the menu.

Google Reader Notifier is free, open-source and avilable from Troels’ web site .google reader, rss, newsfeed, menubar, productivity, news, not apple mail, not mail.appSimilar Posts:

Google Reader Notifier updated: More features, fewer bugs

Tim Gaden — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 23:47:29 +0000

The third-party Menubar utility for Google’s news reader, Google Reader Notifier, has been updated with a few nifty new features and the removal of a bug in its version check feature.

The new version (0.22) sports a new icon, adds an option to view the number of unread articles in the Menubar, and has a redesigned menu layout that matches the general Gmail Notifier style. It now also makes a sound (“ping!”) when new articles appear just like the Gmail notifier.

At the same time, a bug that prevented it from properly auto-checking for new versions has been fixed.

It’s not enough to tempt me away from the excellence of NetNewsWire , but it might help Google Reader users stay on top of things more efficiently.

Google Reader Notifier is freeware and is available from the developer’s web site .google reader, gmail, news, RSS, menubar, notification, productivitySimilar Posts: