Are you a Mac + Google user? Then you must use one of the Gmail and Google Reader notifiers to check out if there’s any unread emails and RSS feeds. There are some notifiers which do good jobs for you like Google Notifier for Mac and Reader Notifier. I have been using both of notifiers for a long time (on Tiger) and I was quite satisfied with them. But sometime back, my menu bar starts to busy with many application icons, so I had a bit of research to find out a way to display some of icons on the Doc.

After surfing on the Internet for few housrs, I finally found a perfect solution! It was Fluid.

As they state, “Are you a Gmail, Facebook, Campfire or Pandora fanatic? Do you have 20 or more browser tabs open at all times? Are you tired of some random site or Flash ad crashing your browser and causing you to lose your (say) Google Docs data in another tab?”, if you are, Fluid would help you a lot.

I have set up Gmail and Google Reader on my Doc with Fluid as can be seen below.

The good thing about Fluid is it checks any unread emails (for Gmail) and unread RSS feeds (for Google Reader) automatically and show the counter on the Doc like Mac Mail.

Also you can use your own Doc icons like I did. You can view some good icons for Fluid here.

How to Setup

It’s VERY easy to set up. Just download Fluid and install it on your Mac. Once installed it, open Fluid and fill in the details. For example, if you want to create the Gmail Applicaiton, input like that.

That’s all. Now you can check unread Gmail like Mac Mail.

The counter will be gone when you close Gmail window. If you want to keep track the number of unread emails, one solution would be to hide it. The shorcut is command+H.

Unfortunately, Fluid is only available for Mac OS X 10.5 or later. Hope you enjoy it!

And Today’s Video here