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GoogSysTray: An All In One Google Notifier App


It is a well agreed upon fact that Google makes some of the best products out there in the cloud today. So much so that people are crazy to try out anything new from Google.  Wave and Chrome OS are recent examples of this.
Some time back we showed you GMDesk, that lets you easily access a number of Google products from the desktop. The concept is similar to Mozilla Prism and other site specific browsers.
Being the Google fanboys that we are, here is another software that keeps you on top of what’s happening in different Google services associated with your account. It is called GoogSysTray. The name is kind of lame, as GoogSystray’s SF page points out. However it works great and you will love it, especially if you use different Google products.
Googsystray is essentially a notifier app. Now, before you pass over it just because of it being another one in the herd of notifier apps, consider that GoogSysTray covers more than just Gmail. Apart from providing alerts when there is a new message in your inbox, GoogSysTray also notifies you of upcoming calendar events, new Google Reader items, new Google Voice messages and Google Wave updates as well.

GoogSysTray is available for Windows and Linux. It requires python and pygtk libraries which are installed by default on the major distributions, so that shouldn’t be an issue. Windows users can download the exe installer and install it just like any other application.

Once installed, GoogSysTray requires your Google Account details. You can then selectively enable or disable notifications for any of the services that GoogSysTray supports. There are plenty of options for each of them.
Let’s have a look at various features that are available for different services:

For Gmail, by default, you are notified of any new messages in your inbox. You can additionally specify labels you want GoogSysTray to monitor for new messages. When a notification pops up you have the option to mark the email as read, report as spam or send it to trash, without even opening your browser.

Apart from Gmail you are notified of new items in the RSS feeds you have subscribed using your Google Reader account. You can specify a certain minimum number for new updates that must be reached before GoogSysTray notifies you. An excellent feature, as RSS notifications get overwhelming pretty quickly.

For Google Voice you can read transcripts, get notifications for SMS and send messages without needing anything more than a customizable hotkey to open up the SMS user interface. Being outside the US, I couldn’t verify Google Voice functionality, so your feedback is very much welcome. It also lets you view upcoming events for which you have set an alert in Google Calendar and updates inside your Google Wave account.

You can also customize the time after which GoogSysTray will check for updates for each of the services. In addition there are options to customize the popup notifications that appear. You can change colors, transparency and overall style of the notifications.
GoogSysTray is a nice application you can use to remain in sync with all the commonly used Google Products. Give it a spin and let us know how you liked it. If you know of any other application that you use for similar purposes, sound off about it in the comments!

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