Windows only In the past we've covered some Gmail notifiers, such as Spiffy, but there is always room for some alternative apps. Gmail Notifier Pro is a rather full-featured notifier that goes beyond a simple popup notification.

I hate when I'm sitting at work only to look out the window and realize that it is starting to rain. Then when I go to look at the radar it is a major storm that is moving in, and had I left 30 minutes earlier I wouldn't have had to worry about pulling out my umbrella.

Windows only If you are anything like me you likely hate when something makes itself start with Windows without first notifying you.

The new (default) Windows 8 interface is something that Microsoft has spent a lot of time rethinking, and will drastically shift the way we use computers. The good news is that the classic Windows 7-style interface is still buried underneath for those that want it, but you won't be able to move completely away from the Metro-style UI.

Windows only If you've been looking for a light desktop email application I'd give EmailTray a high recommendation. This isn't something that is designed to replace those full-fledged programs such as Outlook or Thunderbird, but when it comes to a simple mail manager and notifier it does quite well. Plus this will monitor multiple webmail accounts, POP or IMAP, for free.

Windows only I have a rather large collection of a few hundred RSS feeds that I follow daily, but I've come across situations where I'd like to get notifications of certain news items instead of having to sift through all the feeds. That's where Feed Notifier comes into play.

It's apparent that Google is never going to update the Google Talk desktop software anymore, and as a result I've been trying to migrate over to using Gmail Chat since that still seems to get updated on a fairly regular basis.

I've mentioned before that I'm trying to use Google Voice more, and one thing that I'm shocked Google hasn't done is tightly integrate SMS messages with the Google Talk instant messenger.

I've been getting into using Google Voice more and more these days since I'm able to send text messages to any phone number without having to pay for an outrageously priced SMS plan.

I normally don't post scripts and batch files that I use, but I wanted to share this particular script because I use it all the time. VBScript files are nice because typically they are simply coded, and work across virtually all Windows-powered machines. You just have to throw the code in a .VBS file, and from there it can be executed in your batch files very easily.

I've tried all kinds of Gmail notifiers in the past, and many of them leave something to be desired. I have to admit that one of the more recent ones, Spiffy, is on the verge of being awesome. Spiffy is simple, and that is partially because it is available in a portable form. The rest of the simplicity comes from being able to configure up to 5 Gmail accounts in a few minutes.

Having bought my first Mac about a year and a half ago one app that I quickly started to love was Growl. It brought a universal notification system to the operating system that any application could make use of, and the cross-program uniformity made the OS experience that much better.