Thursday, September 17, 2009

After updating Specto, this notifier looks great

Check the comments to my earlier post on Specto to learn that I'd misjudged this notifier simply because I'd failed to install the updated version.
Now with Specto showing its comments in short duration balloons (all configurations for specto are in ~/.gconf/apps/specto/%gconf.xml) it looks very, very good.
In addition it has a quite remarkable versatility in what it can "watch" for you. In addition to Gmail, Twitter and some RSS feeds, right now I'm using it to look at a particular thread in LinuxQuestions which is great as I don't have to keep opening this forum thread to see has anything changed.
However, the fact that it prefers to tell me that Twitter has changed by 17.65% (or whatever) is less useful than the new balloon summarizing each new tweet as provided by the Mumbles notifier.
Despite it's versatility, I'm still trying to find how to get Specto to display a balloon telling each new song being played by Last.Fm. That really would clinch it for Specto.
Anyway, it's certainly worth a look and I'll probably go ahead and try to install Specto in some of my other distros.
To install the latest version in Ubuntu Jaunty, here's what I did:
1. Add these lines to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/specto-bzr/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/specto-bzr/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

2.
sudo apt-get update

3.
sudo apt-get install specto

4. Configure Specto and add to Startup Applications

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