Safari allows you to specify a news aggregator app of your choice to which it pipes RSS subscriptions, but not an online service like Google Reader. Rob Wilkerson has written an extension for Safari 5.0 that plugs the gap.

Using his AddToGoogle extension, users can click on Safari’s RSS button and find that the feed is sent straight to Google Reader. Sweet!

Installation is a little more tricky than one might think. Two things to watch:

1. Make sure that you have the Develop menu enabled in Safari 5.0. You will find the option to turn it on in the Advanced tab of Safari’s Preferences.
2. Make sure that Safari is listed as the default RSS reader in Safari’s Preferences. If you have mail.app or some other aggregator selected as the default application, that choice will override the extension.

Download the extension and click on it to install it. You will see this slightly alarming warning:

Check that it is installed by opening the Extension tab of Safari’s Preferences:

The latest revision of the extension, released today, provides the option to subscribe to feeds in either Google Reader or directly as a widget on your iGoogle page.

Checking this option offers a choice every time you subscribe to a feed:

AddToGoogle is freeware and available from Rob’s wiki page at Codaset.

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,

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.app

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, productivity

Troels Bay has just released a menubar notification utility for Google’s RSS Reader which matches the other Google app menubar notification apps for Gmail and Google Calendar.

The drop-down menu offers the ability to jump into the Reader, to preview the subject lines of articles in your Google Reader feed, or to check for updates manually.

Clicking on a previewed subject line takes you to the original web page rather into Google Reader. A nice touch.

A Preference pane lets you set the period for automatic updates and to restrict notification to articles with a particular label.

You can also choose the level of security you are comfortable with:

Google Reader Notifier is a universal binary, freeware and available from Troel’s web site .google reader, RSS, menubar, notification, not apple mail, productivity

Stephen Love emails to let me know that the R|Mail link for subscribing to Hawk Wings by email is broken.

It must have been that way since I moved the blog to TextDrive earlier in the year. Oops. Apologies.

At least it’s fixed now, with the provider of the RSS-to-email service switched to Feedburner. You can subscribe in the sidebar or here.

I prefer to get the feeds of my half-a-dozen favourite blogs this way. It helps to make my inbox a better “bucket” (as the productivity gurus say) for collecting the information I need to process. It might work for you too. mail.app, apple mail, rss to email, feedburner, productivity, feeds, RSS

Life2Go lets you sync your mail, news feeds, iCal and Address Book info, weather forecasts, petrol prices, travel directions, movie screening and more to your iPod.

It can turn your iPod into a PDA, although of course the communication is all one way. You can’t enter information like new appointments or phone numbers, but it does put all the information you have at your finger tips on the road and out of the office.

In particular, syncing iCal, Address Book and Mail.app messages, safari bookmarks and documents in a variety of formats (RTF, PDF, Word .doc, plan text) makes your iPod a productivity tool.

Syncing these is done on an app by app basis:

You can select which mailboxes, calendars and Address Book Groups to sync, or sync them all. A new version (1.6.4) released today brings significant improvements to the speed and efficiency of syncing Mail.app messages.

As an added bonus, syncing your info like this, turns your iPod into a backup device for some of the most important information you have.

If I owned an iPod I would be most attracted by the idea of using it as a news feed reader. It automatically mirrors your NetNewsWire subscriptions and you can add extra ones directly within Life2Go:

You can read more about the other kinds of information that Life2Go brings to your iPod on the developer’s web site . Life2Go is shareware (USD 12.99).ipod, mail.app, apple mail, ical, address book, syncing, RSS, news feeds, productivity