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May 05 2012
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programming

Trowl 0.7.3 (Tweet Marker Support)

I’m making a development version of 0.7.3 available for anyone who would like to help me test it before it’s released to everyone. This version has better stream error recovery handling, and makes a couple of other minor under-the-hood changes. The most noticeable change, though, is Tweet Marker support.

What is Tweet Marker?
For those who aren’t yet familiar with the service, Tweet Marker syncs your Twitter timeline across applications by recording the last tweet you read. Applications that support Tweet Marker can quickly jump straight to the spot in your timeline where you left off.

How does that work for Trowl?
Since Trowl doesn’t show you a traditional Twitter timeline (at the moment…), it uses this information a little differently.

Saving your last read tweet: in Trowl, a tweet is considered “read” when its notification is dismissed. Every 15 seconds, it will send the tweet that was last dismissed to Tweet Marker.

Retrieving your last read tweet: every 5 minutes, Trowl will pull the latest Tweet Marker from the server. It can’t remove any tweet notifications already on screen, but it won’t send new notifications for tweets you’ve already seen. Instead, it will pick up with the first new tweet. Depending on your settings, this will also happen when you uncheck the Silence option.

How do you enable Tweet Marker?
Tweet Marker has been added as one of the “missed tweets” options:

Tweet Marker

This option covers both tweets and mentions.

I’ve also updated Metro Display slightly. In addition to the coalescing support that I added a little while back, I also changed it so that the Twitter timestamp dynamically updates – this should have been added a long time ago, so I apologize for the wait. I also fixed a nasty memory leak bug.

You can try both of the new toys here:

Trowl 0.7.3 Development
Metro Display 1.5 Development

Please send any bug reports my way – you can comment here, send me a tweet, or post to the Google Group. Have fun. :)

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Mar 18 2011
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programming

Metro Display / Twitter Display Updates & Response to Twitter’s Developer Announcement

Today, I’m releasing a minor update to Metro Display and Twitter Display. For Metro Display, it will now properly display twitpic/yfrog images if the links were shortened by t.co. For both displays, they will now properly link mentions/hashtags/URLs if they appear more than once in the tweet. They can both be downloaded from the usual location. You may need to delete your current versions of the displays before installing the new versions.

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Apr 19 2010
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computers, programming

New Display: Metro

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 screen”, 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.

Metro 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!

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