Specto logo
Please note that RC means release candidate (no, not that soda drink that’s trying to taste like Coke but can’t just quite get it), which here means that this cool app, although I just said that it’s cool, is not to be toyed with much if you’re not the release-candidate-loving sort – I mean, that you’re not willing to sacrifice a bit of lack of feature here or unintentional termination there. You have been warned.
That said, Specto is an application that keeps tabs on anything that you can put a tab on (websites, feeds, social networking and even files) and notifies you when either one of the watched ones are updated. It’s basically a notifier app, yeah, only you need not install one for each of the sites you need to have notification for.
Although it still hasn’t reached the milestone version 1, it has a lot of promise in it (hey, I installed it! LOL). For now, it supports watching :
- IMAP, Gmail, POP3
- Bazaar
- Folder, Process, File, Port
- Webpage, Feed
- Google Reader
If you wanna try it out, there’re download instructions in their website. I installed mine from Ubuntu Tweak (ha! told you it’s cool!) and it didn’t work AT FIRST, because it has some dependencies that weren’t installed. But don’t worry, you can fix that by going through the list of dependencies here, and checking in with Synaptic if you have them. If you don’t, install it and try running Specto again to see if it works.
It works if you see this window show up when you run Specto:
That’s the Notifications window, and that’s where you’ll be setting up the watches – the tabs that you’ll be keeping on sites/files that you need to keep track of. The interface is pretty straightforward and easy to use, so I won’t be too much on detail here.
Here’re a few more screenshots of some of the areas of the application:
Edit > Preferences
sample Gmail notification
