Adam Engst Joining CCATP Podcast Regularly
Allison Sheridan and I have had such a good time on her Chit Chat Across the Pond podcast that she has asked me to be a regular contributor—monthly for now. We’ll primarily be discussing issues I’ve explored in TidBITS in more depth, but one of the reasons I enjoy talking with Allison is that she’s happy to go down side-branching rabbit holes with me, so we cover a lot of ground quickly. If you enjoy listening to Apple tech podcasts, I encourage you to subscribe.
For this inaugural episode, we talked about my quest to avoid missing certain calendar and reminder notifications. Along with a discussion of In Your Face and Due, the apps I’ve already reviewed in the “A Call to Alarms” series, we dove into a slew of related topics, like how unnamed alarms collect in the Clock app, why task management apps only last two months, and tweaky details around notifications (no, you can’t move them, but it would be handy if you could). As a preview of a future TidBITS article, we looked briefly at Calalarm, an iPhone calendar app that can nag you for every calendar event.
By the way, the name Chit Chat Across the Pond comes from the fact that Allison, who lives in California, started the podcast with Bart Busschots, who hails from Ireland. But since she and I are on the same continent, I’m interpreting it as across this pond in our yard.
Adam, there is one sentence in your tidbits article that triggered this response
Well, but you CAN.
There is this nice small open source application called Hummingbird that allows you to define a key-mouse-combo for moving and resizing any window. Just hold the keys and grab the interior of the window to drag it around the screen. This works also for non-draggable windows like the notifications. Yeah!
Code on github is pretty old but it works, I have it installed on Sonoma and use it daily. Hummingbird is also available via Homebrew (see instruction on github page)
Have fun!
Whoa, very cool! Can Hummingbird get notifications to pop up in the same place every time? Moving was the first part of the problem—remembering was the second since I’d want notifications to appear right in the center of my main screen to make sure I didn’t miss them.
Hummingbird was not made for handling notifications. It is just a nice side effect that it makes the notification window movable.
Nice thing is the code is on github. I just checked and figured that albeit the last release is old (v2) Hummingbird is developed further. You can either build it yourself for free or buy a license for a compiled and runnable app.