Use Growl to Remind You to Do Things
MS Word keeps crashing on me which I haven’t figure out how to prevent. It’s sporadic and I’ll often go an hour or more without a crash. Sometimes entire days. Who knows what fickle beast lies within it’s bloated lines waiting to surprise me and destroy my progress.
I needed something to remind me to save my work periodically so I whipped up a quick growl script to pop up every couple of minutes. It’s easier than you think.
- You’ll need Growl of course, so download it. Install the app as you normally would and then copy the contents of the installation to your desktop into a folder of its own (to install the command line tools it has to be on a writable disk).
- You’ll also need the Xcode tools for Mac OSX development (specifically the ‘make’ command). So download Xcode and install it.
- Assuming you copied the Growl installer files to your desktop, open a terminal and type in the following:
cd ~/Desktop/Growl/Extras/growlnotify make install
- Now you can send a growl statement to your screen. You can do that in the terminal just to test your progress by typing:
growlnotify --appIcon Xcode Build complete -m 'growlnotify has finished building'
- Now we need to set up a notification that will remind us periodically. Here’s my command:
while sleep 240; do growlnotify --appIcon 'Microsoft Word' Save fool -m 'Save your work fool!' ; done
This command will prompt me every 240 seconds (i.e. 4 minutes) with the application icon for MS Word with a notice to save my work.
- If you want you can save this as a text file somewhere (say, your desktop) as something like ’savereminder.command’ if you want to be able to easily run it again. Make sure you’re saving it as plain text (if you’re using textedit for example, choose Format > Make Plain Text). Finally, you need to make it executable, so in terminal type:
chmod +x ~/Desktop/savereminder.command