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Keep up with DevelopMentor on Twitter

Thursday, July 23, 2009 2:42:04 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

You may know that I work for DevelopMentor where I'm an instructor in the .NET curriculum (among other cool things I do there). You probably also know I'm kind of loopy for Twitter as evidenced by my Twitter page and .NET community site driven by Twitter:

   http://twitter.com/mkennedy
   http://dotnet.ubbuzz.com/

Today those two things came together in a big way. Introducing DevelopMentor's Twitter presence:

    @dm_the_company
   http://twitter.com/dm_the_company

I encourage you get out there and follow us! Here you will see all the combined Twitter messages of most of the DevelopMentor instructors as well as a couple of messages from DevelopMentor itself. You'll get the chance to keep on top of the world as viewed by some of the smartest people I've had the chance to work with: the DM instructors! You'll see which instructor posted any given message with an attribution at the end (either "via @marksm" or ^MS depending on the available space).

I'm excited about this not just because I think it is cool and useful (and has to do with Twitter :) ), but over the last few days I'm the guy who wrote the back-end systems to make this all go. It was a short but fun project. It's a real testament to .NET that this was mostly written an hour.

After you follow @dm_the_company you might want to interact with some of the instructors directly. Here's our Twitter accounts in a single place for your reference:

http://twitter.com/bmaso
http://twitter.com/danamiga
http://twitter.com/jason_diamond
http://twitter.com/jplane
http://twitter.com/markblomsma
http://twitter.com/marksm
http://twitter.com/mauricedb
http://twitter.com/mkennedy
http://twitter.com/nielsberglund
http://twitter.com/richardblewett
http://twitter.com/tonysneed
http://twitter.com/wallacekelly

I hope you enjoy the conversations we're bound to have on Twitter. Come be part of it.

Signed: @mkennedy

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Gmail New Mail Notifications for Windows 7

Friday, July 10, 2009 9:44:21 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

[Update: Renamed this tool from Gmailer to Gmail 7 due to pre-exiting product name conflicts]

I've been using Windows 7 as my sole operating system since Beta 1 in January. I'm completely loving it and I was pleased to see how many apps worked seamlessly on it. One that didn't and I really miss is Gmail Notifier. No matter how I try, I always get this:

It's insane to me that $130B company can't provide any more than this outdated tool for this job, but I digress...

I've looked and looked for a replacement and they are either no longer online, are crappy applications, and so on. Finally I decided to take matters into my own hands. Introducing a clean, simple, unobtrusive, and free Gmail notification application that works on Windows 7 - Gmail 7:

Gmail 7 simply runs in your tray and plays the Windows new mail sound when mail comes in to your Gmail account.

New Mail:

No New Mail:

That's pretty unobtrusive right? Your account info is encrypted and stored in your user profile and all network access uses SSL.

Download all 41 KB of Gmail 7 here: Gmail7.zip

Requires .NET 2.0 (built into Vista and Windows 7)

Just extract the folder to its final resting place and run it - select "Launch at login" if you want that.

It even comes with some cool ways to view your email by double-clicking the tray icon.

Also thanks goes to Ryan Cook for use of his Gmail C# tools as the basis for part of my project.

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