An Open Source Gmail Notifier for Mac OS X | Hacker News Reader

An Open Source Gmail Notifier for Mac OS X

ashchan.com

16 pointsyehanyin12 comments

"Real-time email notifications considered harmful"

Seriously, if your daily activities require actual thought, turn all that shit off. If you need to know when a critical email shows up from time to time or from specific people, find a tool that does that or wire one together yourself with IFTTT and a push notification service. Your flow will thank you.

Gmail Notifr allows one to set a larger check interval than 'real-time'. As the author of the app, I set my accounts to check every 120 min (work) and 240 min (personal).

That is a start, but any interruption at any time can be disruptive, and email is a particular problem.

What would be handy in a tool like this is being able to set up what I described above; normally don't ever notify me, but allow me to turn on real-time notifications for particular people on demand, or other rules for knowing when it makes sense to interrupt.

For me it's not about getting real time notifications, but about being able to quickly see if I have any messages without having to keep a gmail browser window open all the time. I actually find that I spend LESS time looking at email when I have Notifier running, because I'm not compelled to keep looking at a full Gmail window to see if I have anything. I can easily ignore it most of the time, and when I do want to see if I have anything, I can see it in a half second glance.

I've been using (G)Mail Notifir[1] for a while, and got the current version for free when it first came out. If I hadn't, I'd pay the $3, FWIW.

[1]: It was originally called Gmail Notifir.

I'm using MailTab Pro, which does notifications as well as presenting a mobile web view of the gmail website. I actually end up doing a lot of my email writing and processing directly from the web view because it's so much faster than the full Gmail site.

I just use this in Chrome. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-mail-checke...

We built Chime to keep us from having copious pinned tabs. Let me know if any of you find it useful. http://chimeapp.com

I just pin a tab in Firefox. Keeps me from compulsively checking my email, while still letting me know when new mail has arrived.

Same, plus the "Unread message icon" option from the Labs tab in Settings.

Thanks, I didn't know about that one; haven't checked the labs in a while. Also found a preview pane feature which I'm going to test out.

Doesn't Ubuntu have similar notification widget?

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