Google Notifier for Mac for Multiple accounts.

Here are some of the hacks I’ve found for Google Notifier for Mac to make it usable with multiple accounts.

One problem, however, is that alerts from simultaneous arrival of messages from multiple accounts overlay each other on the screen. Although this is not generally a problem, it is irritating at login. Feel free to leave comments suggesting how to move the alert window for each instance to a different location!

First, duplicate it:

1. Duplicate the Google Notifier application.
2. Select the duplicate, control-click on its icon, and choose Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu.
3. Navigate into Contents, and then open Info.plist in an editor.
4. There is a property in that file called CFBundleIdentifier, with the value com.google.GmailNotifier. Change the property’s value to com.google.GmailNotifierWhateverYouWant instead.
5. Save your change and quit the editor.

Second, identify it:

To solve that, you’ll need the Developer Tools installed. If you havethem, inside the Gmail Notifier app (the copy you made), open Contents-> Resources -> English.lproj -> MainMenu.nib with InterfaceBuilder. Double-click on the BothMenu item and add an Itemmyname@mysociety.com. Save your work, and you’re done.

In addition, I change the color of a couple key Gmail icons for each additional account found in the same Resources folder as above: unread.png and GmailIcon.png (the icons are red, but changed them to blue in the duplicate copy. Pick your favorite color. I used SeaShore, but pick your favorite app to edit the png files).

Third, secure it

Start each version of the Notifier, then for each one pull down the Notifier menu (either Calendar or Gmail), hold down Command and Option, and click Preferences on the menu. You’ll see a hidden settings editor. Enter SecureAlways in the Key field (upper and lower case must be entered as shown) and 1 in the Value field, then click Set. Quit Notifier and start it up again. From now on, all connections with both Gmail & Gcal will be https. Thanks to this comment on the O’Reilly blogs for this trick!

There are a couple other tweaks:

You can use your multiple notifiers to access the same account, but have each one return a different label.

If you only want the notifier to fetch mail with a certain label, you can create a filter. To do this, enter “Label” in the key field and enter the name of the label you want to receive in the value field (that appears in the box brought up by command+option+Preferenes – as above). To receive all mail, leave this field blank.

You can change the number of messages listed in the main menu by setting MaxMessagesOnMainMenu

By default, the menu shows the last four unread messages received (or the last three received and an additional “View More” submenu). To change this, enter “MaxMessagesOnMainMenu” in the key field and enter the number of messages you want on the main menu in the value field (that appears in the box brought up by command+option+Preferenes – as above).

You can add applescript plugins to Notifier:

AppleScript plugins are written by simply implementing a handler like:

on NewMessagesReceived(messages, fullCount)
– Your code goes here…
end NewMessagesReceived

To install, simply copy the script (plugin) to Library/Application Support/Gmail Notifier (create the directory if it doesn’t exist), and restart the Gmail Notifier. An example of a great plugin for the Gmail Notifier for MacOS X is the Gmail+Growl plugin, which sends Growl notifications when new mail arrives.

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