Alex Little

One of the things I need to get on with after the launch is to make some changes to the MSG Alert tool – the one that sits in the system tray to alert users when a new message is received – the key changes/enhancements we’d like ot make are:

• Automatically set status to ‘away’ when the screensaver is active or the user locks the machine
• Pop up alert when new message is received (like Outlook can do when new email arrives) as currently users (including me!) don’t always notice that icon has changed to the ‘message received’ icon (the red exclamation mark in the system tray isn’t alwasy enough!!)
• Create versions of MSG Alert for Mac and *nix (not sure which versions yet)

This will all be quite ‘new programming’ for me, the current MSG Alert is written in C and it’s been about 8 or 9 years since I’ve done any C programming, and I’ve never worked with the Windows API in this way. So I think I’ll have a bit of a learning curve to get up to speed to get the new functionality implemented. Also I’ve rarely used a Mac, let alone programmed applications for it… so we’ll see how it goes!

Any pointers to tutorials or source code for creating applications like this would be much appreciated!! Especially code/pointers/tips/gotchas for creating the pop up alerts like Outlook has for email.