Create Desktop Notifier using Python

In this blog article, we will learn how to send Desktop notifications. We will see the implementation in Python.

What will be covered in this Blog

1. Desktop Notification Introduction
2. What is Plyer?
3. Create a Desktop Notifier

Desktop Notification:

Dictionary definition:

the action of notifying someone or something.

The Purpose:

The purpose behind a notification is to inform about an event and encourage him to take action.

Notifications help people to remember things. It is a small piece of text which appears on the desktop or mobile screen to inform the user about the updates or any other important pieces of information.

What is Plyer?

Plyer is a Python library for accessing features of your hardware/platforms.

If you wish to know more about it, you can refer to Plyer Documentation. Use this link to navigate to the documentation.

Other areas where you can use this approach

1. Set daily tracker for COVID stats
2. Daily notification to take medicine.
3. Hourly notification to drink water.

and many more, it’s completely up to you how to use this application.

Now that you are aware of Desktop Notification and Plyer basics, we can move forward to the coding section.

Time to code!

Installing Plyer

Open your terminal and run the following command

pip install plyer

Now that we have the package, we are ready to import it in our python script.

from plyer import notification

Now let’s specify the parameters. Let's define the title and message.

title = 'Hello Amazing people!'message= 'Thankyou for reading! Take care!'

Let’s look at what the parameters mean:

• title: Title of the notification
• message: Message of the notification
• app_name: Name of the app launching this notification
• app_icon: Icon to be displayed along with the message
• timeout: time to display the message for, defaults to 10
• ticker: text to display on the status bar as the notification arrives
• toast: simple message instead of full notification

Now, let’s pass the parameters using notify method.

notification.notify(title= title,
                    message= message,
                    app_icon = None,
                    timeout= 10,
                    toast=False)

I am passing:

• the title as `'Hello Amazing people!'``
• `message as 'Thankyou for reading! Take care!'
• app_icon as None
• timeout as 10 secs
• and toast as False.

That’s it! We are done. Now let’s save and run our python script.

Here is our desktop Notification. Simple, isn’t it? Hope this tutorial has helped.

Congratulations on creating your first desktop application.

You can play around with the library, explore more features and even customize it further.

Do share your valuable feedback and suggestions!

You should definitely check out my other Blogs:

Visualization of Coronavirus(COVID-19) Confirm Cases in India on Map

All About Google Dorks

GitLab VS GitHub

Resources:

• plyer.readthedocs.io/en/latest
• github.com/kivy/plyer

See you in my next Blog article, Take care

Happy Learning😄