Gmail notifier is dead, so I'm here. But...

[XtroTheArctic]

Hi,

Since gmail notifier is dead now, I looked for a replacement and I am here.

This app looks promising but it has serious problems, well maybe lack of few important features compared to the original one. Yes, these are very important for me and also for thousands of old gmail notifier users. Here they are:

1) Option to move it from taskbar to tray (Default behavior of the original) 2) Unread number on the tray icon, Not as a separate icon for numbers. 3) Open my inbox with singe left click on the try icon. 4) Check interval in seconds (This wasn't included in the original but it would be cool to have it)

I'll try to give it a try for now. I hope you can add these features soon.

Since this is an opensource project, I'm willing to help as I'm an experienced C# programmer if you need.

[shellscape]

Hey @XtroTheArctic thanks for sharing.

1) unfortunately, this will never be an option. Gmail Notifier Plus isn't a replacement for Gmail Notifier, it's a wholly separate app. There's an option in the preferences to put an icon in the tray, which has a tray menu mirroring the taskbar button menu, but GNP was designed around the idea of taskbar use. The tray icon is there mostly for folks who miss the tray icon.

2) I don't really know what you're getting at here. If you can mock up an image to explain what you're requesting, I'll take a look at it.

3) sorry, but that's counter-intuitive and doesn't follow traditional system tray conventions. I have to shoot that one down.

4) several years ago GNP had the option for interval in seconds, but after a very cordial email conversation with google, I was asked to change that to minutes. No joke. They asked a very good question - why would anyone need to check their email more than once a minute? Do you have a use-case for that need? Is there an advantage to setting the interval to 120 seconds versus 1 or 2 minutes?

I appreciate the offer to help out with the code very much, but I don't think there's mass-benefit to adding 1, 2 or 3 (I'm still up for discussing 4).

I started working on GNP for the exact reasons you looked for it (and I'm working on a mac version because I can't find an equivalent on the mac) - and that's why I made sure the source was open. It's not a one-size-fits-all app, but a one-size-fits-most. You're welcome to fork the app and remove all of the taskbar code and logic; you'd essentially be creating a 'Lite' version of it and could modify it to fit your specific wants.

[XtroTheArctic]

Hi and thank you for your quick answer. I didn't mean GNP is a GN replacement. I just said I was looking for a replacement and I found GNP. I think GNP has better features than the original such as multiple account support.

1) I really don't get why it is not an option to move GNP from taskbar to tray. Most of the notifier kind of applications stay in the tray. Only the real window applications stays at taskbar. GNP doesn't even have a real window. It just stay on the taskbar as a huge waste of space. Please check out the screenshot. Did you think that no one is using the old style taskbar with app names visible ?

Skype and Messgenger stays on the taskbar and it's the new fashion right? Well, actually I even found a way to move them from taskbar to tray. (They support this internally, I can't do the same thing for GNP)

2) I mean that, if you move GNP from taskbar to tray, there shouldn't be the second icon next to the one which is showing the unread email count. These two icons should be joined. If there is no email, we should see default GNP icon. If there are emails, we should see the number rendered on GNP icon.

3) Please don't take me offensive but you sound like we are not from the same planet. Maybe I wasn't clear enough. Most of the application which has a tray icon has different behaviors for left and right click. Right click opens a menu and in some cases, one of the menu items is bold. Left click on the icon doesn't open a menu, instead it runs the default (sometimes bold) item in the right click menu automatically. So, if you are interested in detailed application commands, you right click an open the menu. If you are interested in opening the application window (gmail inbox in your case) you just left click and it opens up. You don't need to right click first and select the inbox from the menu. I don't even know what you mean by saying "counter-intuitive". This is the default behavior of almost all system tray applications.

4) This was the least important feature that I need. I would check my emails every 20-39 seconds if it was possible but if google says "no", I won't insist for this. But the first three feature are really important.

I was using GN on PC and MAC both. Since it's dead I'll need a mac version of GNP too. I'd be happy if you do it because I don't have xp on mac development. But still I can help for the first three features if you reconsider them in the light of my explanations.

If you still don't want to implement those, I might have to fork your code. Thank you for making it opensource because I really can't make it from the start.

[shellscape]

Regarding (1) I understand what your argument is, but the app was developed around and continues to focus on users that use the "superbar" or icon-only view of the taskbar. There was even an article published a few years ago by Microsoft showing Windows 7+ user data and the percentage of users still going with, or reverting to, the old style icon+text+small-button taskbar, and iirc it was under 10%. I'd encourage you to take a look at the codebase closely and you'll see just how tied into the taskbar the app really is. Making a tray-only option is the antithesis of GNP's purpose.

I still don't know what you mean with (2). Here's how my tray looks with unread email in two different accounts:

• there's only one icon with the email count. If that's different for you, I'd recommend filing a new issue as a bug and provide a screenshot of what your tray looks like.

I think the disconnect with (3) is that GNP isn't a tray-only app. You're free to disagree with me, but I've been developing on Windows platforms since 3.1 and I'm not about to wire up some janky system tray functionality because someone else happened to. Sorry about that, but I'm beyond convincing. Still, you could fork the project and make that change for your own custom build!

On (4) it's really not a good idea, and considered bad form, to ping any remote service that you don't own or maintain that frequently. If you consider a 15kb document (which is about the size of the xml GNP downloads from google when your email is checked) downloaded every 30 seconds throughout a day, you're downloading that document 2880 times a day. That's ~40mb a day. Not much for a single person. But considering that GNP has ~2 million downloads across the web, and say half of those people actually use it, you're looking at hitting google with ~40TB a day, not to mention headers and other misc data that goes through the requests. That's of course assuming everyone checks their email every 30 seconds, and there are that many users. Now, we're talking about Google and with their infrastructure I'm sure they handle well more than that in other areas, But for an app so small, that'd be nuts.

I think your ideas would probably work well for you and I encourage you to fork the app and try to make the changes you'd like to see. But I don't feel that they're a good fit for the main app and the majority of users at the moment. If you'd like to get in on early releases of GNP for the Mac, there's a "Software by our Members" forum on neowin.net that I'll be putting early builds on..

[XtroTheArctic]

1) I know that the majority of the windows users are using the taskbar with icon-only. This is because it's the default setting and most of the people doesn't even know if there is an option to turn it back to old style :) People just start to use a software (or an hardware) without doing any tuning for their own comfort. I, as an advanced user, always go the options windows when I install a new software or video game. Using the application or playing the game without checking the settings and customizing it to best fit is very primitive behavior. I of-course doesn't expect everyone to be an advanced user. That rule also applies to windows taskbar settings. They just install windows and start using it without knowing the benefits of the custom settings.

Apple, Microsoft or Google sometime feel the need of forcing people to change their habits for their own good (profit, competition, selling the same shit with new package). Few examples are icon-only taskbar, metro UI, flat icons or killing the gmail notifier. They do this by just looking at the usage statistics but the statistics aren't necessarily true always. That's actually behaving like a racist and ignoring the minority factions while developing new laws which is unacceptable. But big companies can do that because they are profit driven, I understand that.

Please look at that. What is this shit? C'mon, those companies have to face the reality. C'mon look at that... http://kcissell.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/windows_scrollbar_evolution.png

2 and 3) Without implementing the first feature, these don't need to be discussed about.

4) Just because the exact very first reason I talked about (ignoring the settings and using the default options), this won't be a problem even if you provide "1 second check mail interval" option. Because no one would use it :) Maybe the 0.1% of the users would use the intervals below 60 seconds and that wouldn't impact anything much compared to the global google search traffic or spam email traffic on the internet :)

Again, I very thank you for making this project open source and developing it with C# because I really need it and I'll try to fork it when I have spare time. Thank you!

[XtroTheArctic]

I was able to download the source code, build and run it very easily. Thank you for the great job. Most of the opensource projects are very hard to build very first time.