Notify Me

Posted on Nov 19th 2009 | 0comments

We are living in the age of information where so much is happening everyday that it’s not easy to catch up with all these rapid developments taking place around the globe. Thankfully we can always remain updated about all these developments with the help of social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter and with informational websites like TechCrunch, Mashable , Reuters and others. However, nobody would like to keep browsing these websites the whole day or keep checking their mails every minute or so. Instead, we would like to get notified whenever something new pops up. This is where notifiers come in action. There are already a plethora of notifiers available on the internet. However, we would be focusing on the best notifiers available for Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and RSS Feeds on three different operating systems i.e. Windows, Mac and Ubuntu.

Windows

Growl for windows is an excellent application which can not only notify you about Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and RSS Feeds, but also about your foobar playlist, Visual Studio builds, torrent downloads and even Google Wave inbox!

Click on image to enlarge

Gmail Notifier Plus is a pretty cool application for Windows 7. It integrates perfectly with the awesome Windows 7 taskbar.

There is a Google Reader Notifier which works well on both Windows 7 and Windows XP.

Extensions are also available for the developer build of Google Chrome. As of now, they have some sample extensions like Gmail notifier and RSS Subscription. You can also get extensions for Facebook and Twitter on this site. Honestly speaking, I was pretty impressed with these Chrome extensions. They are pretty slick as compared to Firefox add-ons.

TweetDeck is also an excellent cross-platform application which allows users to send and receive tweets and facebook updates.

Mac

There is no doubt that Mac has got some of the best notifiers. I would like to begin with the Facebook notifier which has truly set a benchmark for all the notifiers. It has all the elements that should be present in a good notifier- its slick, you can post updates from the notifier itself and it integrates well with the task bar.

Notify is a Gmail notifier for Mac which is much better than the official Google notifier.Notify will keep track of your Gmail accounts and will display a consolidated unread email count on the Mac menu bar. Once clicked on, it will show a dropdown list of unread messages at a glimpse.

Reader Notifier is another small menubar utility for Mac which notifies you when you have new unread items in your Google Reader account.

Growl for Mac is much better than its counterpart in Windows as it supports a plethora of applications in Mac as opposed to a few number of applications in Windows.

For twitter notifications, I would again go with TweetDeck

Ubuntu

CheckGmail is a pretty good Gmail notfier for Ubuntu. CheckGmail is a system tray application that checks a Gmail account for new mail. When new mail is present the tray icon changes, an optional animated popup is displayed and a tooltip displays the number and details of new messages. Each message can be opened directly in a browser window, and many common Gmail operations (marking as read, archiving, deleting or reporting as spam) can be carried out on messages directly within CheckGmail, without the need to use the Gmail web interface.

Unfortunately, Ubuntu does not have a decent Facebook notifier.Still,I was able to find some sort of a notifier which had to be executed from the terminal.The notifier has been developed in Python and you will have to execute the Python file to start the notifier.Plus points are - it resides in your system tray and gives growl like notifications, infact better than growl. But there is no option to update your status from the notifier unlike the Facebook notifier for Mac. Although, it can be made possible if you know some Python.

I would still prefer using TweetDeck for sending and receiving tweets and Facebook updates

That's it guys! This was all I had to share with you. I hope this post would be helpful to you. Looking forward for your suggestions in the comment section. :)

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