It’s been a while since we’ve updated you on the goings on with Notify, so here’s a quick status update of some of the stuff that’s going to be in 2.1.

Multiple Message Selections: One of the largest requests that we’ve gotten, and it will be in 2.1.

Mail.app / Mail Client Integration: Another large request. It will also be in 2.1. You’ll be able to either open messages via the right click context menu, or by specifying the double click option.

Passive Server Communication: 99% of people don’t care about this, so you can skip it. However, if you’re interested in this sort of thing – we’re currently in the process of reworking the backend to use a queue-style system. Things will now happen in the background, sort of like Mail.app.

UI Refinements and such: We’ve made some tweaks to the UI to make things a bit more logical.

Other features: Gotta keep some stuff secret.

There is currently no planned release window for 2.1. Since this release is a rather major under the hood change, we will be having a beta testing period – we’ll let you know more about that when we’re closer to release.

We pushed out Notify 2.0.7 earlier today, which contains several fixes and improvements. If you’d like to see everything included, go take a look at the release notes.

The most important changes are as follows.

• Notify now lets you set the name of the folder you’d like it to check. This is useful if your inbox is not called, “inbox”.
• Command + Enter can now be used to send messages.
• Esc. can now be used to close the new message window.
• Delete now works properly across all Gmail accounts. Before, a small number of accounts experienced messages getting archived instead of deleted.

Hey everyone, we’re putting Notify Pro on sale for $6 (40% off!) for December 26th only – a Boxing Day sale of sorts. Are we insane? Probably. Go check it out before we change our minds!

Update – The sale has now ended.

It’s that time folks. As of today, Notify 2.0 free and pro have been released, so go check them out!

So, what’s new?

Pretty much everything. We’ve completely rewritten Notify 2.0, and added a crapton (Yes, that is a valid unit of measure) of new features. Hence, why it is now 2.0, and not 1.1. What sort of stuff has been added? What has been changed?

Thank you everyone for your interest! Beta applications have now closed.

We will be selecting people at random from the group of you who applied – you should be hearing from us in about a week.

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?