Give Your Pidgin More Bite With Snarl

// July 29th, 2008 // Organization

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I recently noticed a shared item from Google Reader in my FriendFeed that I hoped would solve a major issue I’ve had with keeping up with things. I have Remember The Milk for storing my To Do items and Google Calendar for keeping track of dated events. I even have a slick method for capturing events and items via my desktop launcher. I should be on top of things. But there is a piece missing.

Google Calendar allows alerts via Email, Pop-ups, and SMS. This should work out great, except that I don’t have SMS right now, I don’t keep GCal open, and I don’t have a method to notify me of new mail on my desktop. I have Remember The Milk set up to notify me via Google Talk of upcoming items, but there is still a chance I may ignore the new chat window (sometimes I get a little caught up in FriendFeed).

Snarl, in combination with Pidgin, actually provides me the best solution. I always have Pidgin running to handle various communications needs (Yahoo/AIM/GTalk/IRC/Jabber), so it makes perfect sense for my notifications system to center around it.

All I had to do was:

Install Snarl
Install the Snarl Extension for Pidgin, PidginSnarl
Make sure my GTalk Account in Pidgin was set for Email Notifications
And enjoy the Snarly goodness!

Here is a screenshot of the types of notifications I get from Pidgin now:

As you can see, I now receive notifications about new email messages, including reminders of how many new emails I have. As an added benefit, I can monitor Identi.ca and other messaging services without actually switching to the Pidgin window.

This means I spend more time on task and doing what I should be doing, and less time playin on Identi.ca. I no longer miss those important podcasts I keep adding to my calendar because I’ll get a desktop notification. I will also recieve new IM’s from Remember The Milk directly to my desktop.

Don’t forget to check out the other extensions available at the Snarl homepage (FireSnarl, for instance).

Did I explain this poorly? Do you have any experience with Snarl or Pidgin that you would like to share? How do you handle notifications to make sure you don’t miss things?

You should also read:

Diabolic Preacher

is this thing not supposed to snarl, like a audio notification?

Rahsheen

It's mostly for visual notifications, but I believe there is an option
for audio as well. Haven't played with it in a while :)

Abhishek Kumar

snarl is a great tool. Probably many applications will try and support it in future...

Diabolic Preacher

@Abhishek given that it is BSD-style licensed, its a very very probable thing happening in the future, except that a lot of windows users may not have used mac to know what to expect from a growl competitor. Hope the growl devbase can give in some inputs on this side as well.