How to live with Google Notifier
I’ve been relying more on Gmail of late. At first I used Fluid to keep Gmail in its own dock icon and process, but that was suboptimal because Fluid shares cookies with Safari, so whenever I logged out of my Google account, it’d whack the Gmail client.
I switched to Chrome as a Gmail client, but Chrome can’t reflect unread messages in the dock icon, so I started using Google Notifier, which was tremendously annoying. Its faux-Growl notifications can’t be customized for appearance or duration, can’t be dismissed en masse with an option-click, and inappropriately open new windows in my default browser, which isn’t Chrome.
While I was casting about looking for Notifier source code so I could waste half a day, Jesper came to the rescue with Google+Growl, a Notifier plugin offering real Growl hooks, and a browser-selection preference. Inordinately better.
The only remaining problem was that the notifier ran on a 15 minute interval, leaving me with stale data a lot of the time. That turns out to be fixable via user defaults. Quit the Notifier, and in a Terminal window, type:
defaults write com.google.GmailNotifier AutocheckInterval 3
… all on one line, where “3” is your number of desired minutes between polling attempts, followed by a return. It’s not exactly push email, but it’ll do. Relaunch the Notifier to save changes, and carry on with your day.
