…we at Macworld Germany recently switched from Entourage to Lotes Notes 6.5, and so far it does the jobs really fine.
But I’m used to a notification of new mails in the Dock-Icon of the Client, the optional Pop-Up-Window really annoys me, and the optional sound doesn’t help much when I’m not at my desk.
I’m searching for a notification alternative, maybe an Apple Script or Menubar-Plugin, that reads the unread document count of the main inbox and displays this information in a specified position (window or menubar-icon).
Does anyone have some tipps or hints how this can be accomplished? Programming experience with Apples Developer Tools for OS X is available. We’re running on OS X 10.3.2, by the way.
You should be able to selectively override any of the mail notification functionality. From the notes client click on File → Preferences → User Preferences. In the dialog that comes up select Mail. At the botton of the bottom of the general tab (the default) you can set the “When new mail arrives” options. i.e. Turn off pop up, sound, etc. Another option you might consider (though I don’t know if it’s available for the Mac) is Notes Minder. It should have been installed by default when you installed Notes. It’s a little stand alone program that will monitor your mail file (even when Notes is not running).
I do not know anything about the Mac side of this.On the Notes side, the C API provides access to unread marks. You can open the mail database that is specified in the current Location document. (There is an undocumented short way to do this.) Then you can get a table of the IDs of unread notes, and table of the IDs in the Inbox folder, compare them and count the matches.
There is also a way to trap notifications to the Notes client’s status bar. You might be able to use this to detect the “You have new mail” message and trigger the rest of your code.
Another way might be to use a scheduled local agent to do most of the work within Notes, running a little external code to display the count.