I’m going to try and keep this short and sweet so I can get this posted :)
A few weeks ago, it occurred to me that the typography-heavy Metro would work well as a Growl display. Specifically, the Windows Phone 7 home screen had some potential to be an interesting layout.
I knew that I wanted the application name to be a large font and slightly “off screenâ€, like when you drill down into a section on the Zune. The rest of the design was a bit harder to nail down though. I played with a lot of different prototypes, including one that was almost a direct rip of the Windows Phone 7 home screen – blue boxes and all. In the end, though, it was too much for something that was supposed to provide subtle notifications.
So I compromised and went greyscale. I tried to retain the “blocks of information†style of Windows Phone 7, but not go too overboard with it. At this point, I was still considering this display to be just a general-purpose display. But as I thought about it, I realized the “blocks of information†concept would be wasted if it didn’t do more. So I decided to extend it to have the same Twitter/Trowl functionality as my other, Twitter-based display.
A few weeks later, and lots of tweaking and fine tuning later, the first pre-release of the Metro-inspired display is ready.
A couple of things to note:
You need the Segoe UI font for this to render properly. You might be able to use this display without that font, but I’m not sure how it would look.
Like TwitterDisplay, the Twitter features show up in Trowl, or any other app that decides to use the same sort of hooks.
This display has all the same features as the current version of TwitterDisplay. In addition, it also lets you choose the corner of the screen you’d like the display to appear at.
This is a pre-release and may have bugs. Feel free to contact me if you do have any troubles with it. There are a few more things I want to add to this display before making it final. But it’s in a final enough state now to offer it as a preview for those interested.
… And I think that’s it! If you’d like to try it out, you can click here to install it automagically into Growl. If you prefer the hard way, here is a direct link to the archive. Extract it to a folder called “Metro†in your user folder where Growl’s settings and displays live (AppData/Local/Growl/2.0.0.0/Displays on my machine).
Enjoy!