Winify is a Windows Desktop client for the Gotify notification system.

Note that some of the screenshots might be obsolete.

With Image and Text	With Text	Application Manager

Winify implements something we created and named "Toast to Stickies", which is the process of seamlessly converting a toast popup notification into a "desktop sticky". The idea is that while the user works at the computer, a notification might show up that might be important and, compared to the other notifications, the user would want to keep the notification lingering around for while. "Toast to Stickies" implements that functionality by simply letting the user drag the notification away from the stack that is unfolded onto the desktop and, in doing so, the notification becomes permanent on the Desktop. Of course, the user can later close the notification by clicking the little red square in the upper right of the toast.

Here are the features:

• ability to receive notifications for any amount of Gotify servers just by providing the URL to the Gotify instance,
• supports both HTTP and HTTPs Gotify servers (with options to ignore self-signed certificates for installations that do not have a recognized certificate authority),
• allows the user to configure notifications based on their application ID,
• allows configuring the amount of time all notifications remain on screen,
• on startup / restart, Winify can automatically retrieve past notification up to a configurable time span and display them,
• can use an intermediate proxy to connect to remote Gotify instances,
• backward compatibility down to Windows 7
• ability to display rich content, including images, such as markdown passed though by Gotify as sent by Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr or Whisparr
  • the client is constantly tested against Servarr software, such as Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr and Whisparr in order to make sure that all the rich notification is offered on the opening toast
• an application manager allowing the user to add and remove applications from Gotify remotely with Winify

Winify is not (yet) integrated with the Windows notification system due to wanting to maintain compatibility with Windows 7 and due to the fact that notification systems are not inherently indigenous to desktop systems. "Notifications" have been introduced by Apple yet only incidentally due to Apple wanting a smooth transition between their portable devices and their desktop systems. "Notifications" (in the sense of popup-toasts) on Windows are not part of any long-standing standard and "taskbar callout bubbles" is the closest thing to a "notification system" that at least has some historical weight and hence a correct integration with the other Windows subsystems.

Since there is no well-established standard for Windows notifications, Winify devises its own toast system that works for all Windows versions, not only Windows 10 but also for older versions back to Windows 7. The Winify notification system innovated by Wizardry and Steamworks also allows for cool stuff to be done such as pinning a notification permanently by dragging it, copying the text of a notification and others, all of it being stuff that the built-in notification systems added in later Windows versions would not provide.

Maybe at a later time, integration with the Windows 10+ notification system will be offered conditionally, while still preserving backward compatibility with Windows 7 but given that there is no standard in effect and nothing compelling creators to comply with whatever default notification system Microsoft comes up with, many other applications (for example, the entire Adobe suite) will find their own way of doing things (they already override the standard graphics since long before Windows 10) just like Winify does.

• Winify

You can check out the source using the Subversion URL:

• http://svn.grimore.org/Winify

Assuming that a user is created on the Gotify server for which applications are defined that receive notifications, Winify should be configured via the settings to connect to the Gotify server using the configured Gotify user. Once Winify is connected to the Gotify server, any notification will appear on the desktop as a popup that will disappear after a configurable amount of time.

For the lack of a better term, Winify provides an "Announcements" tab in its settings where users can configure various "per-ID" settings of notifications sent by Gotify. For instance, it is possible to configure the duration or even the appearance of some notifications based on the Gotify application ID that is sent along with the notification.

The application ID is displayed by Winify, after the subject, for example, in the following image:

the application ID is 10 and the server sending the notification is media.internal. The numeric ID 10 can then be used to set per-application rules in the Winify settings on the "Announcements" tab:

Winify was released on the 21st of September 2021 and is licensed under the MIT license.

Credits for the icons goes to flaticons.com.