Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Notify 2 - The best Gmail notifier on Mac


I have been struggling to look for a good Gmail notifier on Mac since forever. There are a lot of them, but no one was perfect. I used to use Google's official Gmail notifier on Mac. It is pretty good, but it only supports one account and it misses a few basic functionalities, such as letting the user decide how often to check emails. I asked Erik, who wrote Herald, to write a notifier for people who do not use Mail.App, but he did not have time.

Today, finally, Vibealicious released Notify 2 and I loved it! The previous version of Notify was not an option to me, because it did not support Google App accounts. But Notify 2 has almost everything I need:
  • Multiple account support.
  • Google App support.
  • Basic operations in the app, such as to delete a message, mark as read and such.
  • Be able to open a browser window.
  • Be able to set up how often to check.
It can be further improved for a few things in my opinion:
  • The icon on the menu bar is not pretty.
  • It should support single-click disable/enable.
  • It should show labels, or even use labels to filter notification.
  • It should allow different configuration for different accounts.
  • It should support multi-selection of mails.
  • The interface is good and clean, but I think it could be cooler :-)
Notify 2 supports many other account types as well. If you want an email notifier on Mac, check it out.

Updates: Just found out that Notify uses MailCore, a framework to process emails via IMAP and SMTP, developed by my pal Matt Ronge.



Great job, Matt!

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