Specto brings Instant Notifications and More to your Desktop
Linux/Gnome: Specto, now version 0.3 release candidate 1 is a little dock-able desktop notification tool, that night-watches your email accounts, prefered websites, feeds, Facebook and informs you when these accounts are updated; say a new mail, a Facebook status update, new feeds and so on and provides a “Jump to” link to the updated account – – that opens up in your default browser.
It also monitors updates/changes in directories, files, system processes and ports.
I find it useful when it comes to email and feeds update notifications.
Specto 0.3 rc1 supports both POP3 and IMAP to retrieve messages and encrypts your passwords using GNOME Keyring.
I can keep my email checking at a 30-minute interval, and the feeds checking at a 20 minutes interval – – refresh/update intervals can be set differently for each indivclassual event.
Given that Specto “watches on” Google Reader and well too, for better productivity, add all your feeds to Google Reader (create an account if you don’t have one) and get notified for updates via Specto.
It is strongly recommended to set the refresh interval to a reasonably high value – – for a lesser network bandwidth consumption.
Specto’s Notification icon right-click menu permits you to “Refresh All” events, “Mark As Read” all feeds without open your browser, open up the “Preferences” window and “Quit”
Specto 0.3 rc1 is not so “smooth”. The pop-up notification window is cute at-all on Ubuntu, and it has an issue too, it will not close on its own – after the given notification period. Often the information it gives is not precise, like “Google Reader has received 1 new newsitems in … totalling 387 unread items”
Spectro also permits automation, say open your browser when a new mail arrives, but idid not find what to do about it.
Specto 0.3 rc1 is released under the GNU/GPL license