GMAIL NOTIFIER 1.6 README

<pre>
<h1>GMAIL NOTIFIER 1.6 README</h1>

<b>DESCRIPTION:</b>

Gmail Notifier is a MSN Messenger like popup for Linux, Windows or MAC OS X 
written in Python that pops up an alert when new mail is received to your Gmail account.
In this 1.6 release, many, many new enhanements have been added that improve the
notifiers performance and usabilty. Configuration can now completely be done from 
within the program, quota can be checked and it has multilanguage support. 
You can exit the program gracefully and it is faster and more reliable. 

A big thanks to Juan Grande for his large amount of development work. This application
is proof of his excellent coding skills. 

Thankyou also to Richard Viney and Japostoles for their 
very helpful code contributions and testing.


<b>REQUIREMENTS:</b>

Python          (version 2.3 or higher)
PyGTK           (version 2.0 or higher)
GTK             (version 2.4 or higher)
libgmail        (verson 0.0.8 or higher)

libgmail 0.0.8 http://libgmail.sourceforge.net/
is included with this source tar.gz. Other versions WILL NOT WORK due to
a change in the way Gmail now authenticates.
Earlier versions of the other libraries may work, best thing to do is try them.

Since the libgmail library is included in the same directory as the main Notifier
program, no installation of it is nesercery.

You cannot use any other version of libgmail than the one included, if you use
one from some other package eg. an rpm then Gmail Notifier WILL NOT WORK.
The only permissible other package is the one included with Debian unstable
which the one included was taken from. If you have another libgmail installed,
you should take steps to remove it to force it to use the included one.
So that means that if you download the 0.8 version of libgmail off Sourceforge
it will not work. NO other versions will work but the one included and the
Debian unstable one.


<b>INSTALLATION:</b>

Once you have the required libraries installed, open the notifier.conf file in your favourite
text editor and edit the configuration options to match your system. Below is an
explanation of each option:

gmailusername - fairly self explanatory, must be without the @gmail.com at the end
gmailpassword - obvious

browserpath - this is the full path to the browser that you want Gmail Notifier to
open when you click the popup to goto your Gmail inbox

voffset - this is the amount (in pixels) the popup will be displaced from the bottom of
the screen, it will almost definately need changing to suit your system, ideally,
you want it to look like it came out of the bar along the bottom of the screen the
best way to adjust it is to run it initially with the default value and then add/remove
from it then test again. Higher values result in the popup appearing higher up the screen.

hoffset - same as above only this is the amount the popup will be displaced from the side
of the screen. Higher values will displace it more to the left of the screen.

checkinterval - this is how often Gmail Notifier will check for new mail (in ms), do NOT set it
lower than 20000 (20 seconds), or the libgmail library will not keep up, causing many strange
side effects. If you need to check your mail more than once every 20 seconds, then chances
are your famous and don't have time to read your mail anyway.

animationdelay - this is the amount of time (in ms) that Gmail Notifier will wait before moving
the popup up one step, when the popup is popping up, to high values will cause the animation to
be jerky, to low values will cause tearing at the bottom of the popup. 15ms seems about right.
Only small adjustments are necercery, best thing is to leave it alone.

popuptimespan - this is the amount of time before the popup will dissappear again after popping up
you can set this to  whatever you want


<b>RUNNING:</b>

For testing purposes, you can just run it from an X console by going into the working directory and
typing ./notifier.py it will tell you in the console what the popup is doing. 
Long term, you will want the notifier to start when X windows starts, there are a number of ways
to bring this about, the best way is probably to use your window manager (eg. kde,gnome,icewm etc)

Instructions for running it on startup of KDE are given below:

Start a Konqueror window, click 'Go' and then 'Autostart' then right click and click 
Create New->File->Link to application... Type a name for the Link eg. gmail-notify 
on the window that comes up, then click on the Application tab and in the 'Command' box,
type PATH_TO_GMAIL_NOTIFIER_DIRECTORY/notifier.py > /tmp/gmailnotify.log
replacing PATH_TO_GMAIL_NOTIFIER_DIRECTORY with the path to the place you untarred your
Gmail Notifier to. Then, in the 'Work Path', put just the path to the place you untarred your
Gmail Notifier to. Then click 'Advanced Options...' and uncheck the 'Enable launch feedback'
checkbox, that way you won't get an annoying hourglass the bottom of the screen while the 
notifier launches.

For autostarting the Notifier on other windows managers, consult the window managers documentation

That should be it, when new mail arrives, a popup will come up notifying you. If you have questions 
or comments, please email me on wintersoft@gmail.com 
If you make modifications that you find are 
useful, please let me know as well, and perhaps we could migrate them into future releases. 

Thankyou for using Gmail Notifier.

John Winter
wintersoft@gmail.com
</pre>