The Hackerspace Status Notifier is a small app i created to show me the current status of P-Space, the local hackerspace I happen to manage, and notify me when the status changes.

The (Hackerspace) Status Notifier checks for the contents of a specified URL, by default http://p-space.gr/status/ and notifies the user upon change. It uses Growl for notifications, and also adds an item on the status bar which always shows the current status (Green for Open/On and Red for Closed/Off).

Usage

The program starts with an unknown status (Yellow icon) and checks for the value of the URL every 10 seconds. The contents of the URL should be either 0 or 1. If it is something more complicated, the string will not be properly evaluated as an integer, and it will be considered an unsupported value, thereby not changing the current status. The same is also true when the connection to the URL cannot be completed.

Disabling subsystems

The user can also disable the statusbar (menu) icon and/or the Growl notification if he wishes by editing the user defaults from the Terminal. For example, to disable the statusbar icon one needs to type:

defaults write com.tzikis.Status-Notifier -boolean disableMenu true

To disable the Growl notifications:

defaults write com.tzikis.Status-Notifier -boolean disableNotifications true

If you wish to re-enable any of the above, you just have to replace true with false.

Replacing URL and notification strings

You can also use your own URL, Title (for the notifications), and Description for the On and Off notifications. For example, to use a different URL:

defaults write com.tzikis.Status-Notifier URL http://p-space.gr/status/

And to set the Title, On Description, and Off Description accordingly:

defaults write com.tzikis.Status-Notifier Title "My Epic Status Notification App"

defaults write com.tzikis.Status-Notifier OnTitle "The awesome thing i made is On"

defaults write com.tzikis.Status-Notifier OffTitle "The awesome thing i made is Off"