MailPulse

From ProxiPedia

I wrote MailPulse when the PowerMate 2.0 software was released. That release was an improvement, but it broke one of my favorite Konfabulator widgets: PowerMate MailPulse by Kevin Kohn. PowerMate 2.0 did not allow the PowerMate to be controlled from Applescript.

So I tried to emulate the widget with Proxi, and this is the result. The general behavior of the Blueprint is:

- If Mail.app is running, the Blueprint checks to see if there are any unread messages. Depending on the number of unread messages, it will set the PowerMate's light to pulse with a frequency that increases with the number of unread messages (up to 5; then the pulse rate maxes out).

- If you press the PowerMate button while holding down the Control key, it will activate Mail.app (a trick copied from the Mail Sack Blueprint).

- Just switching to Mail.app will not stop the pulse. You have to read the unread mail!

- If there are no unread messages, or Mail.app isn't running, it will set the PowerMate brightness to a default value.

Some notes:

• No, this Blueprint doesn't use the Mail Monitor Trigger. It uses an Applescript that's scheduled to run every ten seconds.

• If Proxi is running a scheduled script every ten seconds, will your Mac go to sleep according to your Energy Saver settings? The answer is yes; I checked this.

• Unlike the Konfabulator widget, there's no dialog box that you can use to change the performance parameters of the Blueprint (e.g.: the interval between successive checks for unread mail; the pulse rate for a given number of unread messages). If you don't like my choices, you have to edit MailPulse yourself.

• While developing this Blueprint, it became both obvious and annoying that you can't set the PowerMate pulse rate or brightness based on a value; you have to create a separate task with a fixed pulse rate for each rate you'd like to have enabled in a Blueprint. The developers of Proxi may want to take this under advisement.

• If you don't have a PowerMate, it probably won't do anything. However, I have not tried removing the PowerMate from my Mac to check; you can take away my PowerMate when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. I don't know if Proxi crashes if you have a PowerMate Light task but no PowerMate attached.

• Do I use MailPulse? Uh, no. After I spent a few pleasant hours developing it, I discovered that Griffin had released an update to their PowerMate driver, version 2.1, which now allowed Applescript control of the PowerMate. I edited a few lines in the PowerMate MailPulse widget (changing "PowerMateDriver" to "PowerMateDaemon") and it worked just fine. But lots of folks don't use Konfabulator, or may be interested in how I did it, so I decided to make the Blueprint available.

--Wgseligman 18:09, 10 November 2007 (CST)