Hawk Wings » notifications

mail.appetizer beta now works with 10.6.4

Tim Gaden — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 23:04:02 +0000

Speaking of notification utilities, Stefan Schüßler is actively at work updating his popular (and beautiful) mail.appetizer plugin for mail.app.

The most recent development build (150) works with 10.6.4. You can download it from his development snapshot page where you will also find instructions for installing it.

For those not in the know, mail.appetizer makes beautiful notification previews of incoming email, with options to handle the email at the bottom of the preview window:

You can follow Stefan’s progress in releasing new development builds on twitter .Similar Posts:

Msgpush.com: Better push email for the iPhone?

Tim Gaden — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:37:37 +0000

Msgpush.com is a new web service that takes advantage of the iPhone 3.0 software to offer instant alerts on the iPhone when email arrives in your inbox.

When the iPhone was first released, there was a lot of hype about it offering true push email on the go for users. Everyone hoped that this would be provided through the IMAP IDLE extension, which would have made the feature available to all IMAP email services that support IMAP IDLE.

In fact, it turned out that this service was available first of all only to Yahoo.com mail users, and then later in the iPhone 2.0 software to Exchange users, and it doesn’t use IMAP IDLE.

The best my iPhone can do is poll my IMAP accounts through its “Fetch” feature every fifteen minutes.

Hoping to overcome this limitation, msgpush.com offers iPhone users the option to receive faster notification of new email by providing each user with a “fake Exchange account”.

Here’s how it works: You sign up at msgpush.com. It monitors your IMAP account through IMAP IDLE, and then sends notification of new mail to your iPhone through the Exchange protocol. Sounds clever, but there are some caveats:

You need to surrender your username and password for the IMAP account to msgpush.com, which not everyone will feel comfortable about.
You need to set up a new Exchange account on the iPhone to receive these notifications. But Exchange only allows you to run one profile at a time. So, if you have one configured already (as I do for my Zimbra account at work), this service is a non-starter.
It doesn’t actually read or push the email itself, only a notification that the email is waiting in your account’s inbox. So you still need to retrieve the email manually.
It’s still in beta and, according to some users, is proving a little erratic.

Still, even with these quibbles, it may be the solution that some users who can’t wait fifteen minutes are looking for.

I haven’t tested it (see 2. above), but you might like to. Sign up at the msgpush.com web site.

[With thanks to the Fastmail blog and forum posters ]

UPDATE: Tom Yager writes more on push email and the iPhone 3.0 software at InfoWorld. imap, imap idle, exchange, iphone, pushmail, notifications, Similar 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:

Easy Growl alerts in iCal

Tim Gaden — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 15:44:29 +0000

Some time ago, while I wasn’t watching, Thomas Aylott updated his clever scripts which make iCal able to pipe its alarms through to Growl.

Previously, when Hawk Wings last blogged it, the process of activating the scripts was rather difficult and involved a lot of digging around in iCal’s guts.

Now Thomas has packaged up the scripts in a disk image along with step-by-step instructions on how to install them:

Four steps and you are done. Then you can enjoy Growl’s alerts instead of the iCal’s big scary messages with the jangly alarm clock.

The disk image is available on Thomas’s web site.ical, growl, notifications, scripts, hacks, tipsSimilar Posts:

Get selective GrowlMail-like notifications

Tim Gaden — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 13:39:56 +0000

David Coffin has written a little applescipt that “mimics” the new mail notifications offered by GrowlMail.

When I first started using Mail.app, I loved the full-on “in your face” style of notifications offered by Mail.appetizer, GrowlMail and other apps. After a while I started to find them too distracting and stopped using them.

However, there are some emails that are worth getting distracted by — emails from your boss, from your partner, from your partner containing the words “This is your last chance”, PayPal notifications of donations to defray the running costs of Hawk Wings or whatever.

The alerts that the script generates look good. It even picks up my customised Mail stamp icon.

And because this is a script, you can attach it to a Mail rule that will alert you only when emails emails arrive that match those criteria (or more sensible ones of your own).

Setting it up is easy.

Just create a new rule in the Rules pane of Mail.app’s Preferences.

Set whatever conditions who want notifications for (the screenshot below will notify me of any email my boss sends me) and select “Run AppleScript” as the action.

Navigate to wherever you saved the script from David’s site, and select it.

All done.

Now I am much better placed to react quickly to anything my boss sends. So he knows that I am always focussed on his needs and not bunking off to write posts for Hawk Wings or playing Civ IV.

Sneaky, eh? Productivity at its best.mail.app, apple mail, productivity, applescript, notifications, growlmail, rules, tipsSimilar Posts:

OmniGrowl: Growl alerts from iCal, RSS feeds and more

Tim Gaden — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 12:12:59 +0000

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, Similar Posts:

Google Notifier for Mac: Gmail, Gcal alerts

Tim Gaden — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 23:05:35 +0000

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, menubarSimilar Posts:

Clever Growl hack for iCal

Tim Gaden — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 12:41:45 +0000

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, productivitySimilar Posts:

Hacking iCal to display alarms with Growl

Tim Gaden — Mon, 15 May 2006 12:44:50 +0000

A thread on Cocoa|forge discusses some ways in which you can hack iCal so that it will display its alarms through Growl.

Suggestions centre on modifying iCal’s internal applescripts to send iCal notifications to Growls Helper.app so that Growl catches them, following a modification of the instructions in an old macOSXHints, which routes notifications through sendmail.

A further interface hack replaces the “Email” alarm option with a “Growl” one.

The downside to this is that you sacrifice the ability to send notifications via email.

It seems like a lot of work to me, but if you are into that sort of thing – and never forget to back things up first – you will enjoy the challenge.ical, growl, notifications, hacks, applescript, tipsSimilar Posts: