Tag: ALERTS

Notificant is an OS X reminder app designed to work with multiple computers. It's not vying to replace Growl on your Mac; it's more of a complement to the venerable notification app. While Growl lets you get alerts from apps on your local machine, Notificant lets you create new alerts and reminders and send them to any of your computers. Sure, with a little bit of tinkering in the Terminal, ...

Google Chrome. Google Calendar. They're two great tastes that now taste even better together, with the addition of Google Calendar desktop notifications for Chrome. Notifications are still in Labs, but you can turn them on right now to get Outlook-like alerts for your calendar events. Just make sure desktop notifications are on in your Chrome settings, and then enable the "Gentle Reminders" item ...

If you're on Mac OS X and iCal's notifications just aren't slick or powerful enough for you, you might want to try a new app called Alarms. It's a simple and clean way to set timers, alarms and other notifications, without using iCal. I'm more of a Google Calendar man myself, so I'm finding the lightweight, pretty Alarms app quite useful. It's extremely easy to get started with Alarms. ...

Large websites (like DownloadSquad or any other major blog/site) have full-time sysadmins, dedicated hosting facilities, and a ton of fail-safe mechanisms to ensure that they're always up and available. However, if you have a small site that's running off of a shared host you may sometimes be surprised to discover that it's down. That rarely happens, but when it does happen you usually discover ...

Boxcar manages all the push notifications on your iPhone, letting you add sources like Twitter, Facebook, email and RSS feeds. It's an extremely useful app, and the latest version also comes at a useful price: FREE. That's right: Boxcar 3.0 has a completely revamped appearance, an iPad version, and some new alert sounds, and it's available at the lowest of low prices. Boxcar's new pricetag ...

Facebook has added a new security feature that will send you an email or SMS when someone logs in to your account from a computer that Facebook doesn't recognize. It takes a little bit of work to set up, but it could be a very clever line of defense against Facebook hackers or "friends" who might have gotten your password somehow. To turn this feature on, go to Account Settings and find ...

The problem: You know of a Twitter List consisting of people whose opinion you value on a very specific topic, but you don't have time to follow everything they say. The solution: Listimonkey is a service that will watch any Twitter account or list you'd like to monitor for keywords, then email you either hourly or daily with an alert when one of your keywords is detected. There are all sorts of ...

A little while back, the Pingdom crew released a handy iPhone app which enables on-the-go monitoring of your website through their service. Now they've added a desktop application to the mix - perfect for those times when you're relaxing comfortably at your workspace. The notifier runs on Windows XP, Vista, and 7, and it's dead simple to set up and use. Install it, enter your credentials, and ...

I love Growl, the highly-customizable systemwide notification app for OS X. In fact, I love it so much that I rounded up the 10 coolest Growl styles on Download Squad a while back. Well, my post might be totally invalid now, because there's a new Growl style in town, and it's the best I've seen yet. Meet Mono. Mono is a slick, dark style featuring subtle animation, and it was created by ...

Finding a particular item you want on Craigslist can be a matter of actively checking back every day to see if somebody has listed one in your area, but for the lazy amongst us, there might be a better way. Check out Heycraig!, a site that watches Craigslist for you, and sends you an email alert when a new post matches your search terms. It's city-specific, and kind of tricky to fine-tune, but if ...

With free software, it's a given that you're going to encounter the occasional nag screen. You know, those in-your-face pop-up messages that remind you about an enhanced professional version or remind you that you haven't checked for updates in ages. ClickOff is terrific at rubbing out annoying nag screens. Launch the program, switch to any window and press control + alt + d to add it to the ...

If you use Google News frequently, you may have recently noticed something missing from your search results. The buttons to create RSS feeds from search results have been removed from the page. The missing buttons don't prevent you from creating RSS feeds anyway, though. There are a couple of ways to do it. If your browser autodetects RSS, you can just click the RSS icon in the address bar to get ...

If you're signed up to get email when someone new follows you on Twitter, you're probably used to seeing just the tiniest bit of information about them. With only a person's name and Twitter URL, you're forced to click through and change focus from your email to Twitter if you want to know more. Twimailer uses a neat workaround to replace Twitter's new follower emails with its own better version. ...

Sometimes you just don't want to sit in front of a browser window and hit reload. Maybe you're waiting for plane ticket prices to drop, or maybe you want to be the first person to apply for fresh jobs on Craiglist. Trackle is one way to get alerts via email or SMS for practically anything on the web. You can Trackle stocks, product prices, and even people. To set up a new alert, just browse ...

It seems like only yesterday that I was writing about Notify Me When It's Up, a site that lets you know by email when a website comes back online. Actually, it was a few days ago, but someone has already built a fancier version of Notify Me. It's called Ding, It's Up, and it adds SMS and Twitter notification options, and tells you when a site goes either up or down. Despite my praise of Notify ...