Finally.
I’m proud to release the first beta version of Google+Growl, the successor to Gmail+Growl. To recap: Gmail+Growl was a plugin for Google Notifier that made it able to show Growl notifications. Gmail+Growl was first released for Gmail Notifier, but Gmail Notifier was later replaced by Google Notifier, which was able to show notifications for Google Calendar events, too.
Google+Growl finally closes the gap and can now show Growl notifications for Google Calendar events. Also, you can click a button to instantly preview the Growl notifications.
Due to a change in token field implementation on Mac OS X 10.5.2, releasing a Google+Growl that would run on both 10.4 and 10.5 would keep cutting off some of your spaces in the notification text. Therefore, Google+Growl 3.0b2, the version released today, is built just for 10.5. I intend to revert this if at all possible, since due to technical reasons I can’t use any 10.5 features anyway.
Although the original Gmail+Growl started out as a quick hack on a weekend night, it is by far the most widely used product waffle software puts out — it just passed 50,000 downloads a few days ago, and the bulk have been of the 2.0 version that’s been out since the middle of August 2006. I think a lot of people are going to be happy when they see that I’m not planning on abandoning the product.
I was looking to do something similar on Windows with Snarl. Any suggestions or tips?
By http://technorati.com/people/technorati/codeodor · 2008.02.17 05:07
The Windows Gmail Notifier doesn’t have plugin support, so a direct parallel isn’t possible. However, Google Notifier works by checking the Gmail Atom feed, so just make something that checks that periodically.
By Jesper · 2008.02.17 11:04
Hej,
Great job on the new version (or is it “new product” ?), thanks a lot.
Just a quick suggestion, though. I see it is possible to click the Growl note to be redirected to a web page, but since I use Gmail via a desktop app, I have no use for this. It would be much more practical to me if, instead of picking a browser, I could pick any app (such as a “tell application ‘Mail’ to check mail”-style applet). Better even would be to generate a message:// URI.
Anyway, your Google+Growl is awesome as it stands.
Louije
By http://openid.aol.com/lj.t@mac.com · 2008.02.17 17:45
Thanks.
I’ve thought a bit about that sort of problem, including helping Mailplane’s author implement Mailplane as an eligible browser in that list. It’s a tough nut to crack, since message:// URLs don’t actually point to something useful until the mail has been fetched. (I even think Mail’s IDs in those URLs are generated by Mail and not by Gmail, which means that it’s literally impossible for Google+Growl to calculate this.)
It’s very hard to come up with a generic solution to this problem since every desktop mail client is different. Implementing being able to pick any script or application instead of a specific browser would complicate the application and not really implement the full feature. For now, my prevailing advice will be to instead use Growl plugins for those mail clients and to check mail more aggressively.
By Jesper · 2008.02.17 20:34