A Desktop Google Voice Set-Up for Mac
Putting the GV Interface in a Menu Bar Icon with PUSH Growl Notifications
There’s been a lot of talk out there about Google Voice set-ups that aren’t web-based (damn you, Google, for alienating us native desktop app lovers!), but I was far from satisfied with them. I don’t want it in my dock, and I want the Growl notifications to be pushed to my computer. Otherwise my phone will just vibrate before my computer knows I have an SMS message; it’s just annoying. So I thought I’d share my set-up. It’s not perfect, but it’s not too shabby either (also, I should note right now, you need MobileMe or some other form of push e-mail linked to Growl to make this work – if IDLE is working for you in Mail.app [it's been flaky for me in the past], that should work too. If you haven’t already paid for MobileMe, don’t). Here’s how to set it up.
First of all, for those wondering, I did go the Fluid route. For those of you that don’t know, Fluid is an app that makes SSBs (site-specific browsers), which means it displays a web site as a separate app on your computer. This is very useful for all things Google – for example, if you love Google Reader more than all desktop apps, you could make a Google Reader “app” that shows an icon in your dock, and when clicked on, displays your Google Reader (generally with the navigation bar and all other “browser crap” hidden). Fluid can make a dock app OR an app controlled by the menu bar – which is what I did – in the picture above, you just click on the phone icon and your Google Voice Inbox drops down. It’s quite nice. But that’s not the best part – the part I really wanted was push Growl notifications for SMS and voicemail.
The popular solutions out there involve installing some sort of Google Voice-to-Growl plugin to the SSB, or something of the sort. Not only do you need Firefox for this to work (as far as I can tell), but your notifications are still “fetched” and don’t even have the message – they just say “1 unread message from Google Voice.” Very recently, though, Google released a feature that lets you forward all SMS messages to your e-mail! Thus, instead of having a Growl plug-in for the SSB, I just have all my SMS and Voicemails forwarded to my e-mail address – for which I have Growl notifications, obviously. This way, SMS messages are immediately “Growled” upon being sent. Nice!
Those are the basics. I had to make a few tweaks to really get it to work the way I wanted. For example, I really don’t want my e-mail inundated with SMS messages and voicemails from Google. So, in Mail.app, I just set up a rule that took all messages from Google Voice (From contains: txt.voice.google.com) and did two things to them: moved them to a folder, and then deleted them. Anything else and I wouldn’t get a notification – I think the app just didn’t have enough time to recognize the incoming message. That is, while it’s being moved, the Growl notification has time to register and pop up, but then once it has, Mail.app has moved on to deleting the message. If you just have it delete the message, you won’t get Growled. That’s just the way it works. What’s nice about this is you can put it in any folder you want (I have a separate folder for Twitter messages, so I just threw it in there), because it’s just going to get deleted a second after you receive it. Not bad at all.
The other caveat is that each person’s SMS is sent from a slightly different e-mail address from Google – which means that if you want the GV icon in your notification (as shown above), you’ll have to manually add each person that texts you into your address book. Otherwise you’ll just get the generic Mail.app icon in your notification. This isn’t too bad, as I only text, like, 5 people, and once you find out what their address is, you can put it in Address Book. I contemplated adding the e-mails to each person’s vcard, but that would have been really ugly to look at scrolling through my Address book – so I opted to just have one REALLY ugly card (called Google Voice and with the picture being the GV icon) in lieu of having people’s Address Book pictures show up in the notifications. Besides, it’s gotten to the point that Growl integrates with so much stuff on my computer that when a person’s face shows up in a notification, I can’t tell whether it’s an email from them, an IM, a facebook post…so I don’t mind that it’s just the GV icon. It says who it’s from in the title anyways.
So that’s that. This may seem very simple and pretty dumb to some, but it took me a while to come up with this, and sadly it’s the only real “push” option I have at the moment, so I thought I’d make a quick post. Hope this helps somebody.
UPDATE: This is pretty much obsolete. There are lots of other better ways to handle Google Voice on your Mac…a quick Google search of Lifehacker reveals a couple (Yeah, okay, I wrote like half of them), and there’s also GVXMPP, which is what I’m currently using (with Adium). It’s pretty convenient.
Just wondering, where did you get the phone icon to use?
I knew someone was going to ask that, and I'm bummed I deleted it…I actually made it myself. I just took the Google Voice icon, turned it to pure black & white in ColorSync, got rid of the speech bubble, and added alpha around it in Preview.