5
Chapter 1 — Desktop Integration
Mac OS X
OS X users have a choice of two applications, both very similar to each other, and
doing pretty much the same thing: placing the mail notification in the menu bar
at the top of the screen.
GmailStatus
Carsten Guenther’s GmailStatus (http://homepage.mac.com/carsten.
guenther/GmailStatus/) is a good example. It displays new mail counts for the
Inbox, and each individual label you might have set up, adds a hotkey to launch
Gmail in your browser, supports Growl notifications (see http://growl.info/
for more on that), and gives a hotkey to write a new message in Gmail (see Figure 1-3).
FIGURE 1-3: GmailStatus in action, with Growl notification
gCount
Nathan Spindel’s gCount (www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~natan/gcount/), shown
in Figure 1-4, is very similar indeed to GmailStatus in terms of functionality, with
perhaps two interesting additions. First, you can have a new mail count in the
dock, and second, it takes your Gmail username and password from the keychain.
This is a nice touch.
Linux, etc.
People using Linux, or any other Unix-style operating system with the option to
compile things, have a whole series of potential Gmail applications to choose
from. Linux users will also find the scripting done in the later stages of this book
to be very simple to implement.