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Techelopment

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DIY Desktop Notifications with Python

Creating a python script for a “do it yourself” reminder is very easy! The player library is all we need 🙂

First let's install the library:

pip install plyer
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Before moving on to our reminder script, let's take a look at the notification module that will allow us to generate a notification.

The import of the notification module is done like this:

from plyer import notification
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The function to use will be notification.notify, its main parameters are (full docs here):

title (str) - Title of the notification 
message (str) - Message contained within the notification 
app_name (str) - Name of the application 
app_icon (str) - Icon to display next to the notification message 
timeout (int) - Time to display the notification in seconds (default 10) 
ticker (str) - Text to display in the notification bar
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We are ready

Now that everything is configured and described, we are ready for our script.

The script below will display a notification with the title
“⏰ REMINDER” and the message “Have a break 🙂”.

The notification will appear for 5 seconds ( timeout=5 ) every 15 seconds ( time.sleep(15) ).

The notification will have as its icon the file “icon.ico” contained within the folder where we decide to save our script.

Please note: the “app_icon” parameter only accepts .ico type files

import time 
import pathlib 
from plyer import notification 

curr_path = pathlib.Path(__file__).resolve().parent 

notification_message= ''' 
Have a break 🙂 
''' 

if __name__ == "__main__" : 
    while ( True ): 

        notification.notify( 
            title= "⏰ REMINDER" , 
            message=notification_message, 
            timeout= 5 , 
            app_name= "My Notification" , 
            app_icon= str (curr_path)+ "\\icon.ico" , 
        ) 

        time.sleep( 15 )
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Here is the final result:

Desktop reminder


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