RHP Notifier

RHP Notifier is a Mac OS X application that shows a status icon with the number of games waiting for your move at online chess site Red Hot Pawn.

Download RHP Notifier 1.1
Universal Binary, requires OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or greater.

RHP Notifier is free to download and to use. The source code is available.

Please email comments, bug reports, feature requests etc. to the author at
nick@reqr.net

Demo Video

User Guide

Install

Download the zip file and unzip it, then move RHP Notifier to your Applications folder. To uninstall, simply delete the application by dragging it to the Trash.

First Run

To run, double-click the RHP Notifier icon in Applications. Look at the row of icons in the top right of the screen and you should see a grey chess pawn. Click the icon and click 'Connect...'.

You will not be asked for your username and password. RHP Notifier uses the information contained in a cookie stored by the Safari web browser to check how many games you have waiting.

• If you already are logged in with Safari (even if Safari is not open at the moment), then you will simply have to click Connect again to agree to using the existing cookie.

• If you normally use a different browser, you will need to login using Safari just this once. Normally, RHP Notifier will link to your games in the default browser. You will also need to enable the "Enable multiple browsers to be logged into the same account" option in the My Site Settings menu of the RHP web site. After logging in using Safari, fully quit Safari before returning to RHP Notifier.

Check Games

Once you have connected, the RHP Notifier icon will change to indicate how many games are waiting for your move. If there are no games waiting, the icon will be black. Otherwise, the icon will turn red with the number of games displayed next to it.

When you click the icon, the menu will appear. The top line of the menu tells you how many games are waiting. Clicking this line will open a link to your waiting games.

After the first check, RHP Notifier will wait 1 minute before checking again. Over time, the interval between checks will be increased up to a maximum of 30 minutes. This is to prevent causing an excessive load on the RHP server. However, every time you click the RHP Notifier icon, the interval is reset to 1 minute. In addition, you can always click the Check Now option in the menu.

Settings

The settings menu allows you to set RHP Notifier to run automatically when you log onto your computer. You can also ask it to check automatically to see if new versions of the software are available. Turn on Enable Sounds to have an audio alert when there is a new game. If you have Growl installed then you will see notifications of the number of new games. To change this behaviour, go to the Growl preference pane.

Known Issues

If you are challenged to a game and it is your turn first, this game will not appear in RHP Notifier until you make a move. This cannot be fixed in the software and would rely on RHP making a change to their XML interface (please!).

Version History

Version 1.1 (10 Jun 2010)

• Added a sound alert, as requested by some users. This can be enabled in the settings menu.
• Added Growl notifications.

Version 1.0.5 (24 Feb 2010)

• Reduced the file size
• Minor tweaks

Version 1.0 (23 Feb 2010)

• Initial release

© Nicholas Moore.