Get Android Notifications Pushed To Your Desktop

There may be times where you do not have the time to pay attention to your Android phone. This can be at work where you may not be allowed to have your phone out in the open, or with you at all, or in situations where you are working with noise-cancelling headsets that would, well, make you ignore the phone’s notifications.

And while you probably can live without your phone for the time being, you may have a nagging feeling in the back of your head that you may be missing out on important notifications. This can be an emergency call, an important reminder that you receive per SMS or simply the fact that your Android phone is running low on battery.

Android Notifier is a free app for Android, that works in combination with Windows and Mac operating systems as well as Linux distributions. It basically redirects notifications from the phone to the desktop you are working on.

The phone currently can notify you about the following five events:

When the phone ringsWhen you receive an SMSWhen you receive an MMSWhen the battery is running out of powerWhen you receive a call to your voicemail

You will for instance see the callers phone number on your desktop PC if the option has been enabled. The Android app can be configured to send notifications on all five events, or only on select events.

You furthermore need to configure how your Android smartphone should communicate with your desktop system. Available for selection currently are Wifi or Bluetooth, with an USB option coming in the future.

Once you have set up the notification and connection options on your phone, you need to install a notification application on the desktop. A program that needs to be downloaded and run on the system is provided in the project’s download section over at Google Code. I suggest you follow the guide there to get everything set up properly.

If you plan on using Wifi as the connection type, you should be ready to go right after installation of both applications as Wifi is enabled in both apps by default. You may want to check the Wifi options on the Android app’s settings page if you run into issues there. It is also necessary that both the phone and the desktop PC are connected to the same network.

The app has an option to send a test notification which you can make use of to make sure everything has been set up correctly.

Android Notifier is a handy app for Android phone owners who sometimes cannot pay attention to their phone, but would like to be informed about important events.

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About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Tuesday February 21, 2012 -
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Get News Notifications On Your Desktop With Feed Notifier

RSS feeds are dying. That’s what I’m hearing left and right. Many say that social networking sites have replaced them. And while social networking sites like Twitter or Facebook may be useful to stay up to date, they are nowhere near as accessible as a feed reader. You first need to follow users who post the news that you are interested in, then need to wade through everything they post to find the news, and lastly stay on the social networking site or use a desktop app to avoid missing news.

Feed Notifier is a news notification app for the Windows operating system. When you first start it up you are asked to add feeds to the program that you want to monitor. This is done with a right-click on the program’s system tray icon and the selection of Add Feed. You can also open the options to add feeds there.

Feeds can only be entered one at a time which is a severe limitation, especially if you want to monitor hundreds of feeds. You could combine multiple feeds with Yahoo Pipes to reduce the setup time.

You can configure the polling interval and notification border color for each feed individually. A popup is then displayed in the lower right corner of the screen whenever new content has been added to one of the added websites and services.

Controls are displayed at the bottom of the popup that allow you to go back and forward, and to pause the automatic updating. A click on the news title or blog name takes you to the site in the default system browser.

The popup appearance and behavior are configured in the preferences as well. Here it is possible to change the maximum title and body length, change the duration the popup is displayed or display it in another position or on another monitor.

Feed Notifier won’t check feeds if the computer has been idle for at least 60 seconds. It would not make sense to display news on an idle computer, as it is likely that the user working on it is currently not present. The option can be disabled if that’s preferred.

Filters can be configured for all feeds or individual feeds. These exclude news matching select keywords. This can be useful if you want to reduce the number of news popups throughout the day.

Feed Notifier is different in this regard from other feed readers such as RSS Owl or Google Reader. It is not a program that you open to read up on all the news item that have been posted since the last time you have taken a look. Its realtime approach works best if only a handful of news feeds are monitored. If you monitor hundreds, you probably end up spending more time looking at new news popups than working on the computer.

Interested users can download the open source software Feed Notifier from the developer website.

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Create Your Own Custom RSS News Feed About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Sunday February 12, 2012 -
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Outlook Email Notifications for Important Messages

Most email notifiers inform you whenever messages have been received in a connected email account. These programs usually make no distinctions between important messages and unimportant ones, which can be a issue of the account is regularly flooded with spam, newsletters and other non-time-relevant messages.

The free Microsoft Outlook add-in Important Mail Alert changes this by allowing you to specify exactly when you want to be notified. The program installs itself automatically, and Outlook users find its entry in the Outlook interface after installation. The Ablebits tab displays a single button that displays or hides the add-in configuration screen in Outlook.

The program supports keyword based rules and will look in the mail subject and body for selected phrases. This is the core difference to Outlook’s own rule based system which can only be configured to look for keywords in the subject of the email.

Keyword only rules are somewhat limited on the other hand, as it is not possible to link keywords to senders for instance or integrate the system into Outlook’s own rule based system.

Alerts are then displayed as notifications on the screen and in the program’s alert tab.

A click on the configuration icon opens the list of mail accounts that you want the rules to be valid for.

Lets take a closer look at the benefits the add-in provides. We have already mentioned that it will not only search the messages subject but also the body text and the to field. That’s however not the only improvement over Outlook’s rule based system. Important Email Alert in fact runs completely independent, which means that you will receive alerts even if the message is moved by Outlook’s own rules system.

Important Email Alert besides that is compatible with Microsoft’s Exchange Server, and offers to open mails with a single click in its interface. The add-in is easy to setup and use, even though it would be great to have additional filtering options available.

Outlook users who want to be notified when email subjects, bodies or recipients are mentioned can download and install the Outlook add-on from the developer website.

The add-on is compatible with Outlook 2003, 2007 and Outlook 2010, provided they run on a 32-bit or 64-bit edition of Microsoft Windows. The add-in furthermore requires the Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0 to be installed on the system. (via Nirmal TV)

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How To Enable Phone Notifications In Google Calendar

If you are using Google Calendar to keep track of things, you’d probably notice that you only get notifications on your desktop computer if you are on that computer and have the Google Calendar page open. That’s fine if you are working on your desktop most of the time, but won’t do you any good if you are not near the desktop. A laptop or smartphone could help you out here, as data can be synced across devices relatively effortlessly.

Some users on the other hand may not have an Android or iOS smartphone that they can sync their events with. Those users can however configure Google Calendar to send SMS notifications to their phone. This needs to be set up before the option becomes available.

Open the Google Calendar website and locate the options button in the upper right corner of the screen. Click on it and select settings from the context menu.

Switch to the Mobile Setup tab in the Calendar Settings menu. It should display the message that phone notifications are currently disabled for the computer. To enable them, you need to enter your mobile phone number and country into the form on the page. Once you have done that you click on send verification code to receive an SMS code that you need to enter on the same page to finish the setup.

It is not clear why Google is not using the existing mobile phone number, or even suggests to use it. Carrier costs may apply, and a link leads to the supported carriers.

Once done you are taken to notifications where you can configure SMS notifications for the following event types.

New Events: Receive a notification when someone sends you an invitation to an event.Changed events:Receive a notification when someone sends an update about a changed event.Canceled events:Receive a notification when someone sends an update about a cancelled event.Event responses:Receive a notification when guests respond to an event for which you can see the guest list.

It is not possible to configure SMS notifications for the Daily agenda though.

Each calendar has its own notification settings, and you may want to check the calendars listing to make sure they are all set up correctly.

Please note that this changes are valid for each calendar. Some users may want to configure SMS notifications only for specific events, and not all of their events in the Calendar. This is done by editing events directly. If the event exists, click on it and select edit event from the options.

Locate the reminders entry and switch from Pop-up to SMS there.

And that’s how you configure SMS notifications in Google Calendar. Have anything to share, success stories or stories where this did not work at all? Then post a comment below.

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Manage Social Site Notifications With Notification Control

You probably remember the My Permissions service which I reviewed about a week ago. It basically listed direct links to a dozen or so permission pages of social networking sites. Among the sites where some of the most popular sites on today’s Internet, including Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn or Dropbox.

The service offered little more than direct links though which users could bookmark in their web browsers to access the permission pages directly.

Notification Control, created by Ben Lang and Tim Kendall, has been inspired by My Permissions. The core difference is that Notification Control links to the notification pages of popular services on the Internet.

All you need to do is to click on one of the links to be taken directly to the notification page of the linked services. There you can then change if, when and how you are notified. You could for instance block all notifications to your email account if you do not want to receive notification emails anymore, or enable them again in case you’d like to receive emails again.

A total of 12 services are currently supported, among them Facebook, Twitter, eBay, FourSquare and Google+. Users benefit the most if they use more than one of the services, and chance is good that the average user does.

I’d still recommend to bookmark the notification control panel directly, or at least the general control panel of all sites so that you are able to access the pages directly and without intermediary page. Most users do not need to modify notification settings on a regular basis though.

What’s your take on My Permissions and Notification Control? Do they provide a useful service or is it not useful at all?

I’d say it is nice for users who want to quickly check on the notification or permission settings of said services, but that’s about it. (via Techdows)

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