Growl + Atom = Constant Badgering
I’ve finally cottoned on to the Growl app on OSX, a nice little notification system that allows applications to ‘unintrusively tell you when things happen’. Looking into it a little I realised I could couple Growl with a few atom feeds and enable myself to be notified to events such as a new email coming into Gmail or our project’s build failing on Hudson. Introducing growl-atom :
Whether this is a good idea or not is questionable. Entourage - which I use at work - fires a little notification with every new email I receive. This can get more than a little annoying when the Friday afternoon ‘name my hamster’ type discussions kick off. Never the less after a few fun hours coding I have a nice little system that will tell me when (hopefully) important stuff happens.
The code is up on Github if anybody wants to install it. It’s a simple Ruby gem (thanks to visionmedia for the ruby-growl gem), combined with a config file and Apple’s answer to the cron job which is something called a LaunchAgent. Check it out!