It’s been a while since we’ve said anything public about Notify – so we figure it’s time to update you guys on the progress of 1.1.

The first thing you should know is there is going to be no “1.1″ version – we feel this is such a large upgrade from 1.0 that we’re going to be skipping right to 2.0.

Another thing you should know is why our estimate date was so far off. The original plan for 2.0 was to basically just add Google Apps support, and include no new features. But hey, this wouldn’t be very exciting, right? So instead we decided to completely rewrite the codebase again. We probably could’ve gotten away with sticking with some of the old code, but 2.0 is so different internally it made more sense to just start from scratch. Again.

What’s so different? Well, in 2.0 we’ve moved from reading the Atom feed of your inbox, to fetching the contents via IMAP.

Why? We’ve found some quirks with checking via Atom feeds, such as odd cookie problems since we were sharing cookies with Safari. Plus, the Atom feed wasn’t very flexible – it only showed us the 20 newest unread messages, only gave us a short summary of the message, etc. What does IMAP give us? Essentially, IMAP lets us act like a full blown mail client if we want to – pretty awesome eh?

Another thing you probably noticed from that screenshot – we now have support for more than just Gmail – as of the 2.0 release we’re going to be supporting Gmail/Google Apps, MobileMe/.Mac, and Rackspace Email in the free version.

“Free version”?

This is our major announcement – with Notify 2.0 we’re going to be splitting off a paid version of Notify. Don’t worry though, there is still a 100% freeware version that does exactly what it did before. We’re not going to be pulling any features from the free version, as our first statement still stands. The only thing that changes is that some new features won’t be trickling down to the free version.

What is in the paid version? Good question! Here’s some of the most important stuff.

What you see there is in app message creation – one of the biggest personal gripes we’ve had with 1.0 is you had to open Gmail to send a quick message – not anymore. Notify 2.0 supports full in-app message and reply creation.

The next thing that bugged us about 1.0 was you had to open your browser if you wanted to see anything more than the first 200 characters of the message. We’ve fixed this in Notify 2.0. You can easily view full HTML messages via this new Quicklook-esque feature.

A couple more things we’ve added are support for deleting, and marking messages as read from within Notify. As well, the pro version also includes support for any generic IMAP account. We’ve also extensively overhauled the preferences to include most requests, and add tons of extra functionality – you’ll need to wait for the official release too see that stuff though ;)

So, how much is Notify 2.0 “Pro” going to cost? Ten dollars. We’ll be announcing some giveaways and prizes soon, so stay tuned! Toodles!