Hasta La Gadget!

iOS notifications are great for keeping you up to date with whatever’s happening in your apps, but they get overwhelming quickly. With If This Then That, you can now refine those notifications so they’re less intrusive, smarter, and more useful. Here’s how.

Read more…

This article was written on March 17, 2011 by CyberNet.

I have a rather large collection of a few hundred RSS feeds that I follow daily, but I’ve come across situations where I’d like to get notifications of certain news items instead of having to sift through all the feeds. That’s where Feed Notifier comes into play. It is a desktop notification program that is highly configurable to ensure that you only see popups for the things that interest you.

There are a lot of things Feed Notifier is capable of, but the filtering is the thing that caught my attention the most. I have a screenshot below showing off the filter configuration screen, but I’m sure most of you already know how this kind of system works. Much like email filters you can designate keywords that are required to either be or not be in the entry. The developer put together a guide explaining how the keywords work, and goes on to show how you can use special syntax to apply filters to the author, title, or content fields of the RSS entries. You can also choose whether a filter is applied to all your feeds or only to certain ones.

These are some of the other features found in Feed Notifier:

• Supports all common RSS and Atom web feed protocols.
• Configurable polling interval for each feed.
• Configurable popup duration, size, position (multiple monitor support), and transparency.
• Popups do not steal keyboard or mouse focus from other applications.
• Navigation controls in popups to view next/previous items.
• Advanced keyword filtering options.
• Supports enabling/disabling individual feeds.
• Deactivates when user is idle to save bandwidth and processing time.
• Supports authenticated feeds that require a username and password.
• Multi-threaded feed polling.

Screenshot of keyword filtering in the Feed Notifier settings

Feed Notifier Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on August 30, 2012 by CyberNet.

I like to keep track of my of when my favorite TV shows are going to be on TV, and I’ve used all kinds of iOS apps to help me do that. The short list of the ones I’ve tried include TV Show Tracker, TV Forecast, and TvShow Time. Most of them are paid, and they each have their own strengths, but none of them felt like they were exactly what I was looking for.

Once I turned to iTV Shows 2 [$2.99 on iTunes] there was no looking back. This universal app looks beautiful on both the iPhone and iPad, and with the built-in iCloud syncing any show you add on one device will immediately appear on your other iOS devices. That also means the notifications for upcoming shows will appear on all your devices so that you know a little before or after they are going to come on. I find it to be a great companion to sites like Hulu since you can have it display a notification up to a day after a show airs, which in some cases is when they appear on the streaming sites. iTV Shows also keeps track of the shows you watch so that you know exactly where you left off.

There is only one thing that I don’t like about this app. If a TV show has multiple upcoming episodes, such as Burn Notice used in the screenshot above, it will only show the next upcoming episode in the list. I want an option to show all upcoming episodes of a show in the list so that I don’t have to click into a TV show to see the other soon-to-air episodes. It’s a minor complaint, and given how much better this is compared to the competition it’s something I’m able to overlook for the time being.

iTV Shows 2 Homepage [iTunes Link – $2.99]

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on November 19, 2009 by CyberNet.

Having bought my first Mac about a year and a half ago one app that I quickly started to love was Growl. It brought a universal notification system to the operating system that any application could make use of, and the cross-program uniformity made the OS experience that much better.

Then came along Growl for Windows, which was something I took a quick liking to once the Prowl iPhone app was released. I wasn’t sure what kind of future Growl had on Windows since we had already seen other apps like Snarl start to fade out despite being updated regularly. It just didn’t catch on for me.

Growl, however, has become something I’ve installed on all my Windows machines. The notifications are clean and prominent, which can be a combination that is tough to come by. Not to mention the fact that there are also a variety of themes available. My favorite is definitely the Smokestack theme pictured above.

The new version 2.0 that was just released supports images in the notifications, can tell an app when a notification is clicked, can forward of notifications to an email address, and much more. And, of course, we can’t forget about the rapidly growing list of supported apps:

• Autotest – Get informed when your tests pass or fail.
• Emacs – Send and receive Growl notifications from within emacs.
• Firefox – Alerts you when Firefox has started, finished, or failed downloading a file.
• Feed Monitor – Alerts you when RSS and Atom feeds are updated.
• Foobar2000 – Get notified when playing starts, stops, or is paused.
• Gmail – Gmail Growl keeps you updated on new mails in your Gmail Inbox in a fancy way.
• Google Reader – Get notified of new feed items in Google Reader.
• Google Voice – Alerts you to new voicemails, text messages, call recordings, and more.
• Google Wave – Get notified of new Waves.
• Growlbook for Facebook – Get notifications for friend requests, messages, pokes, invites, and more.
• iTunes – Alerts you to the currently playing track in iTunes.
• Irssi – Alerts you when your name is highlighted, you receive a private message, and when someone joins/leaves a conversation.
• jWeatherWatch – Get the current weather and forecasts for multiple locations.
• Last.fm – Alerts you to the currently playing track on the Last.fm website.
• MediaMonkey – Alerts you to the currently playing track in MediaMonkey.
• Outlook – Get notified of appointment reminders and when new mail arrives.
• OWATray (Outlook Web Access) – Get notified of new Exchange mail without having to keep an OWA browser constantly open.
• Pandora AIR – Alerts you to the currently playing track in the Pandora AIR application.
• Pandora Website – Alerts you to the currently playing track on the Pandora website.
• Pidgin – Get Growl notifications for all kinds of Pidgin notifications.
• Postbox – Alerts you when Postbox receives new mail or RSS updates.
• Powershell – Send Growl notifications from your Powershell scripts.
• SageAlert for SageTV – Get notified for all kinds of SageTV events.
• SkypeToGrowl – Get notified of incoming Skype calls.
• Songbird – Pops up a notification when the currently playing track changes.
• System Monitor – Get notified of system-type events like low disk space, battery life, USB devices inserted & removed and more.
• Thunderbird – Alerts you when Thunderbird receives new mail or RSS updates.
• TV Browser – Get reminded when your favorite TV shows are starting.
• Trowl (Twitter) – Get notified of Twitter mentions, DM’s, and friends’ tweets.
• Twitulater – Get notified of new tweets and much more.
• uGrowl (uTorrent) – Get notified when torrents are added, start, or finish.
• Visual Studio – Get notified of success or failure when builds complete.
• Vuze (Azureus) – Notifies you of completed downloads.
• Witty (Twitter) – Get of new tweets, @replies, and direct messages. Sends summary notifications if you get too many updates at once.
• Yawcam (Motion Detection) – Get notified when your webcam detects motion, and then view streaming video of the activity.
• Yip – Transform any Fluid or Prism notifications into Growl notifications.

It’s tough to say how this app will pan out in the end, but I think it has a really bright future. Let us know in the comments whether you’ve given it a whirl, and how you feel about it.

Growl for Windows Homepage (Freeware)

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on August 20, 2010 by CyberNet.

I normally don’t post scripts and batch files that I use, but I wanted to share this particular script because I use it all the time. VBScript files are nice because typically they are simply coded, and work across virtually all Windows-powered machines. You just have to throw the code in a .VBS file, and from there it can be executed in your batch files very easily.

The contents of the file are below, and once set up you’ll be able to send emails using any Gmail account straight from the command prompt. In the code there are two things that you need to configure: the email address and password of the account you want to send as. When executing the VBScript file you simply pass it three parameters: recipient email address, subject line, and the body of the email. There is an optional fourth parameter that it accepts which is the file path to a file you want to attach to the email. That’s it.

Why do I use this all the time? I can easily call this file from other scripts or batch files so that it sends me an email notification whenever something completes. Sometimes I use it just to have a nice history of when some of my batch files complete (or to verify that they even ran), but other times I will insert “dynamic” text into the body of the email. For example, if an error occurred I may have it put the error message in the body of the email. An alternative to that would be attaching a log file using the optional fourth parameter.

The nice thing about the way this script works is that you’ll be able to send emails without setting up an SMTP server on your machine. Of course you won’t be able to send out mass quantities of emails since Google limits you to around 500 sent messages per day, but that should be more than adequate for personal purposes.

Let’s take a look at what the code looks like…

Code begins here:

'Usage: cscript sendemail.vbs <email_recipient@example.com> "<subject_line>" "<email_body>" "<optional:email_attachment_path>" 'Ex. No attach: cscript sendemail.vbs example@gmail.com "test subject line" "test email body" 'Ex. W/ attach: cscript sendemail.vbs example@gmail.com "test subject line" "test email body" "c:\scripts\log.txt" '*********** '****CONFIGURE THE FROM EMAIL ADDRESS AND PASSWORD Const fromEmail = "email_sender@gmail.com" Const password = "password" '****END OF CONFIGURATION '*********** Dim emailObj, emailConfig Set emailObj = CreateObject("CDO.Message") emailObj.From = fromEmail emailObj.To = WScript.Arguments.Item(0) emailObj.Subject = WScript.Arguments.Item(1) emailObj.TextBody = WScript.Arguments.Item(2) If WScript.Arguments.Count > 3 Then emailObj.AddAttachment WScript.Arguments.Item(3) End If Set emailConfig = emailObj.Configuration emailConfig.Fields("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/smtpserver") = "smtp.gmail.com" emailConfig.Fields("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/smtpserverport") = 465 emailConfig.Fields("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/sendusing") = 2 emailConfig.Fields("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/smtpauthenticate") = 1 emailConfig.Fields("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/smtpusessl") = true emailConfig.Fields("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/sendusername") = fromEmail emailConfig.Fields("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/sendpassword") = password emailConfig.Fields.Update emailObj.Send Set emailobj = nothing Set emailConfig = nothing

^ That is the end of the code (Download the Script) ^

You can see that the code starts with example usage of how you can call the VBScript file. Given the nature of executing VBScript files you may or may not have to include the “cscript” portion, but in general you are always better off having it there to ensure that it will run on your computer just fine. Here’s an example of what it looks like when being executed from the command prompt:

Note: The “sendemail.vbs” file was located at the root of the C Drive when I ran this.

Armed with this script you should be able to take it and throw it into batch files, or call it from anywhere that can execute things via the command line. One thing you may want to consider is creating an extra email account just for sending these emails. Not only will that keep your “sent mail” clean in your primary Gmail account, but it will also be a bit more secure since the password for the sender account is stored in plain text within the script.

Here is a nicely formatted version of the VBScript from above that you can download, and have all ready to go for you (after you fill in the two email/password inside the script file, of course):

Download a Zipped Copy of the VBScript

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com