FeedTicker
Gee!Gee! is open source. It's free to use any way you please. Donations are much appreciated!
Download Gee! 1.1.2 Universal Binary : 241,522 byte Disk Image (dmg)
Download Gee! 1.1.2 PPC Version : 267,089 byte Disk Image (dmg)
Requires Macintosh OS X 10.3 (Panther) or later. Works in Tiger!
Thanks goes to Sacha Arnoud for providing version 1.1.2 Universal Binary!
Gee! is a notifier for Atom Feeds that sits in your menubar. It was specifically written to read the Atom feed provided by Google for their wonderful Gmail service. Their feed lists the number of new emails a user has in their inbox. The icon in the menubar displays the number of unread messages inside a lovely blue icon. Gee! can be configured to play a sound when new mail arrives and rotate its icon to grab your attention. New email information appears in the drop-down menu. This is all configurable from a preferences window.
Gee! will not only work with Gmail's atom feed but with any atom feed. Gee! will just show the current number of entries in the feed. The menu subject and email listings may not appear depending on the feed.
Gee! will check for new updates every time it starts up to make sure you are up to date. This can be turned off in the Preferences.
Here's what Gee! looks like when there are no messages waiting:
Here's what it looks like when you have three messages waiting:
And here with the menu open:
Here's the preferences panel:
Why should I create a create a menubar Gmail notifier when there's a perfectly servicable notifier available for OSX? I personally used gCount but during January of 2005 Gmail once again changed their service breaking gCount until a patch could be made. Google had recently allowed POP3 access to Gmail so I thought a kick-ass menubar notifier that could be used for all POP3 accounts would be a fun little project. POP3 doesn't lend itself very well to want I wanted (namely keeping track of NEW emails; POP3 is really only good for pulling mail off of mail servers). Luckily the good folks at Google opened up SSL-protected Atom feeds for users to see what new emails they have brewing. It became the perfect conduit for Gee!.
By popular demand Gee! version 1.1 adds Growl notification support. Here's a screenshot with Gee using Growl:
Gee! uses the Cocoa Atom Framework to parse the Atom feed. It would have taken quite a bit longer to write without it. Thanks! :)
Darren Ford's NSSoundEnumerations code snippet made the sound drop-down MUCH easier to write. Thanks!
The source is released under the General Public License. You can download it here:
Gee-1.1.2-src.tar.gz : 184,320 bytes
Gee-1.1.2-Universal-src.tar.gz : 147,137 bytes
I take no responsibility for the use of Gee!. Use Gee! at your own risk.
Here's the old version of Gee if that suits your needs better. Unfortunately lack of forward thinking caused me to not include a way to disable version checking until version 1.1. Sorry about that.
Download Gee! 1.0 : 191,132 byte Disk Image (dmg)
GEE! COPYRIGHT 2005 DOUGLAS MCINNES. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.