Notify 2 Review

Notify 2 is a brand new iteration of the popular menubar email notifier by Vibealicious. It includes full IMAP support for MobileMe, Gmail/Google Apps, and Rackspace built in, as well as the ability to connect to a custom IMAP server. In short, it's a full-blown email client that lives in your menubar. These are my thoughts on version 2.

The main Notify view is the inbox, which displays a subset of each unread message. One gripe I have about the app is that there's no option to keep a cache of say, 50 messages, instead of just the unread. This is slighty mitigated by the fact a message isn't marked as read as soon as you select it, you have to press the "Mark Read" button (or ⌘-M.), but I'd still like to have a few read messages displayed.

If you'd like to view the entire message, just press the space-bar and the "Preview" window will open up, displaying the entire message, whether it's HTML or plain text.

Notfy 2 also offers you the ability to compose messages/replys without having to open up Mail.app. The compose view is very simple, which is nice if you just need to send a quick reply, or basic email, but doesn't offer nice text formatting like lists, bold, italic, underline, etc.

The only other thing I'd mention is that Notify doesn't support attachments. At all. It doesn't even put a paperclip in the message view to let you know you should probably open up Mail.app to download the presentation before you email your co-worker back that he forgot to attach it ;) If there was at least a notification that an attachment existed, I think it would be a lot nicer.

Overall though, this is a great app, and at $10 for a pro license, I think it's a great way to move some of the heavy-lifting off of Mail.app, and in to your menubar. Plus, it's a great way to support great independent Mac developers.

Thoughts? Follow-up questions? Have another app you'd like me to review? Feel free to leave a comment!

#osx#appreview (∞)