Gadgetory

hey guys Joe the Android guy sometimes it's nice to get notifications on our smartphones or our tablets but a lot of us spend quite a bit of our time sitting in front of our desktop or laptop computers wouldn't it be nice if we got those same notifications instead of on our small screen but on our big screen you can with this app I'll show you how so the app that I'm going to show you today is called a desk notifier you can see I've got it connected right here there's also an icon for it up in the status bar I'm going to go ahead and open that up and you'll see my settings this is a two part solution there's a part that runs on your smartphone or tablet and another that runs on your desktop PC I'll show you that in just a moment you can see here I've got an option to stop the service so it's going to essentially stop doing what you want it to do which is notify you you can test it I'll show you that in just a moment that's where that test is going to be coming from and then you've got some accessibility settings let's jump in there now this lets you essentially show some third-party events if you will an awful lot of stuff that you can do in here just leave it a default and we'll be good now let me clarify these are the default accessibility settings this is the new one added by the the desk notifier app itself it adds itself as an accessibility service so that it can expose some of these notification events through well your accessibility service you can turn that on or you can turn that off just very simply right there of course you should probably have it on to make it work properly auto start you want this thing to start automatically when you turn on your your phone or your tablet make sure that's checked show a notification bar that's that little circle I if I don't want to see that up in the status bar I can tap and you notice that that just went away I can donate if I want to give money to this app developer now also you've got the current version this is one point one point zero and then you've got your Wi-Fi state that's somewhat important because we're gonna use that on the desktop side as well so that's really all there is to it once that's all set up you're good to go you do need to note this IP address or connect via another way that we'll mention so let's get right to the desktop side all right guys so what we're looking at and right now is my desktop I've gone ahead and installed the desktop version of a desk notifier and we can see that right over here desk notifier got three icons a link to their website link to their uninstaller and then the program itself let's go ahead and fire that up and you can notice right down here I have it running and it's successfully connected via Wi-Fi so you remember what I was talking about the Wi-Fi setting let's go ahead and open this up but a connection settings and right over here you can see I've selected Wi-Fi my other option is USB we'll leave it on Wi-Fi but I'll talk about the settings for both first of all Wi-Fi since that's how we're connected we have to type in the phone's IP address now this is a local IP of 192 168 I just basically got that right from the app itself plugged it right in and hit OK we were done the other way you can go about doing this is over USB if you've connected your device to your USB port and you have ADB installed that comes with the Android SDK and you have all of the drivers set up and working properly and you're pointed it to the right path then you can use the USB it seems like an awful lot of work but if you want to do it that way you can one of the things that's missing here is a Bluetooth if I have bluetooth on this computer I have bluetooth on my phone why can't I pair the two with Bluetooth it seems like that would be a lot easier than Wi-Fi or ADB over USB but I digress so we'll go ahead and say ok now we'll just go ahead and work on this so here we are this is PocketNow look launcher Wars open that up now what I'm gonna do is over on my phone I'm gonna launch desktop and notifier and now I'm going to send a test and right there you notice I've got a test notification we'll send it on and not alone have another one huh basically a whole bunch now anytime I get any kind of status or notification update I'm going to get an update right there in my my notification tray that's great if I get say a Gmail or a text message just gonna pop up there where it's not so great let me go ahead over on the phone and fire up rum manager and I'm gonna tell it hey I want to check for a rum update oh look at that update available that popped up it's great I'll say okay and now you'll see aa status update I'm gonna be getting CyanogenMod 9 2012 Oh 5:30 now as soon as you start seeing that then the progress start to increase on your phone you'll notice I'm gonna get a new status indicator update for every percentage see if we can get that to pop up if you've got a really fast download you're gonna see a lot of those it's gonna fill up your whole screen from the bottom all the way up to the top it's ridiculous how much you're gonna get and honestly you're probably gonna want to turn off desk notifier when you are getting your CyanogenMod updates then you see I got an incremental update now I don't know if this is a weird way that CyanogenMod is doing things or if it's the way that desk notifier is doing things but it's really really annoying and this is a slow download so I'm just getting one at a time but I've seen them stacked up all the way to the top and beyond so overall very cool now this is something that I'm not gonna use all that often because I've got Google Voice for my voicemail and my text messages I have Gmail for my mail and I get all of my notifications right there if you're not using those or if you don't have those set up this is a good way to get them all integrated together and get not just those types of alerts sent directly over to your smart phone and I go ahead and turn this off quickly so we can stop hearing that sound but overall I think it's a great idea I'd love to see the inclusion of Bluetooth but I don't know what you think head on over to pocketnow.com and leave us some comments for pocket now showing up desk notifier for Android I'm Joe Levi