I was reading my unread tweets this morning when my friend Francesco Mugnai (@francescomugnai) tweeted this ” RT @bartelme: A nice way to get email notifications in Snow Leopard… http://erikhinterbichler.com/software/herald/”.
I thought “ok, here’s another mail notification plugin. but, let’s see what it does anyway”.
My surprise, Herald is amazing.
Herald works with Mail.app, it’s a plugin that notifies you when you’ve got new mails and lets you perform many actions directly from its interface. The official developer’s website anyway isn’t very explanatory at first: “Herald shows you popup notifications whenever you receive new Mail”
But Herald is so much more. Once you’ve downloaded it here, run the package and install it. Be sure to quit Mail.app before.
Now, you can relaunch Mail.app and wait for a new message to arrive. As soon as you’ll have a new unread mail, here’s when Herald starts working for you.
A floating panel will appear on your screen, showing the standard “From, To and Subject” fiels together with a picture of the author and the whole message. And here come the features: from here you can delete the message, initiate a reply (it will open Mail.app), view the message in Mail.app or even mark it as read.
The process is fast and smooth and I haven’t noticed slowdowns or crashes.
Moreover, you can also customize Herald through the Preferences. You can change its appearance, the time the notification will stay on screen and the mailboxes Herald should interact with.
So, what else can I say about Herald? It’s fast, stable (Snow Leopard fully compatible) and, most of all, free. This is a 1.0 release, so I expect great things from this plugin in the future updates.
