Tlhan Ghun

I really should post more updates here - I live to much in Twitter... :)

So here are the two main news from the past weeks:

1. New project: Winslew
   Winslew is a Windows client to Read It Later which can be used to fully administer your items (add, remove, mark as read, tagging, ...) which caches text only version of the webpage so you can read them whenever you want and whereever you are.
   I just started today a closed beta for it - maybe you wanna be a first tester of it...?
2. Desktop Google Reader 1.2 / 1.3
   I missed to write here that Desktop Google Reader 1.2 has been released quite some days ago already. And of course I already started the next version 1.3 which shall be the "social release" as it will bring liking, sharing, tagging, Read It Later, ... to the next version. Release is planned somewhen in March - I already have done most of those features but the details lack some polishment and testing until now

When looking at the home of WInslew you might be wondering about its domain. While this homepage here is "Tlhan Ghun" Winslew is available at "lI' Ghun". If you know the history of the name Tlhan Ghun you might know it's Klingon for "free software". With Winslew I wanna try for my first time to get a little bit money for my tools (donations never worked...) so this website name would be inappropiate. So lI' Ghun means "useful software" ;)

I hope you all had a good start in this new year 2010 - I did as I have had vacation :)

I have created many new stuff and updates during the last weeks but it looks like I totally missed to announce all those news here on the blog (as I did announce all of them on my Twitter feed (see also on the right of this page.

So here a summary of what is new:

• digiTweet Snarl Edition has now an own installer (which the original digiTweet misses...) and an own homepage with both the installer and the sourcecode.
  
• I created some styles for Snarl which don't display notifications on your screen but...
  • speaks them
  • sends them as SMS and
  • sends them as email
• Uploaded a new version of SongSnarl which is compatible with Songbird 1.4
• Uploaded ThunderSnarl 2.0 which is compatible with Thunderbird 3.0 and fixes some bugs around POP3 accounts
• Finally I am currently active developing a GNTP bridge. What's that? Growl for Mac since 1.2 and Growl for Windows use a new TCP based protocol to send notifications. My bridge (which is called "Paw") listens for incoming Growl notifications and instead shows them using Snarl. This is work in progress - as for the moment I am writing these lines registration of apps and classes works as well sending notifications using those classes. If you want to join the progress (maybe as tester or if you have feature requests) come and join our discussion at Snarl Discuss.

Oh - one more thing: I started the technical migration of this website to a much better technical basis (I find it quite confusing in the moment) but I am very bad in creating nice designs. Anyone wanna create a new style for this website...?

A Firefox extension which displays notifications using Snarl about new incoming and updated Waves in your Google Wave account.

Go and get it here on my new subpage

It is based on the Firefox extension Google Wave Add-on for Firefox by Chad Smith - so most of the credits go to him.

Another one of those with some releases at once. So here we go:

Today I released Desktop Google Reader 1.2 Beta 1 which is a major update to this Google Reader client. The list of changes is long and great - have a lool at the download / release page to get a complete list.

Also I finished today finally what was on my roadmap since quite some time - I just released digiTweet Snarl Edition - go and download it here. digiTweet is a Twitter client with an awesome graphical user interface - I really love it and added now Snarl notifications to it. I have contacted the developers of digiTweet to get some clarification if I shall / could maintain as an on spin off project or how else we can handle this.

I released also a newer version of my Snarl style Tweet it which sends notifications to Twitter. This new version fixes some issues coming from changes in the Twitter API.

Finally Desktop Google Reader 1.2 includes a first version of my newest project. Winkle is an upcoming .NET framework which can be used by developers to easily add support auto update deatures to their applications. It is heavily inspired by Sparkle on the Mac and aims to have at least a similar functionality when it is finished. The currently delievered version is 0.4 - I plan to update this project quite soon to emebd all features I think of.

The great news is that if you are a .NET developer you already can use it right now - as there is no documentation right now (but an example project) feel free to contact me if you have questions or wishes.

Just finished a first version of a Firefox notification tool which uses Snarl for new waves in your Google Wave. :)

It's based on http://thatsmith.com/2009/10/google-wave-add-on-for-firefox and I already contacted the developer (giving him my changed sourcecode) if he wants to integrate Snarl support by default in the next release :)

Get current build here http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/982128/Tlhan%20Ghun/Google%20Wave/google-wave-with-Snarl.xpi. It's very basic until now (no alert classes, no image shown in notification).

You might have noticed fewer updates here in this blog - this is mainly caused by me focusing on Desktop Google Reader 1.2 (did I mention already the 1.1 release? Don't think so ;)) which is my current main project - next to a new one which I will tell you about in a later post ;))

I am very happy to announce today the immediate availability for the long awaited PidginSnarl 2.0 release. There are some major improvements both technically and generally - so here is what is new:

First of all I am very happy that I can say that this release is the first release which is not developed by me lonely. With Utek I found someone being capable of solving the principle problems which had delayed newer releases in the past. So I can't say enough "Thank you" even more as I know he is a Miranda user... ;)

Second is the most wanted feature ever for PidginSnarl - starting with 2.0 if you click on a "buddy signed on" notification it will open a conversation with this buddy. Also clicking on a notification about incoming text in a conversation shall bring this conversation to front so you can answer immediately. I can't count how many requests I had for this feature in the past on all channels I am reading for feature requests (for example here) ;))

Third (and directly out of UserVoice): the notification class "Buddy changed status" is gone - and replaced by several different ones like "Buddy is now away"

Fourth (and final) one: Once again thanks again to Utek the file size of PidginSnarl has been dramatically shrinked - it's now 30 KBytes with all the new stuff already in it. This also has been reported (and seen by me) that it is much faster now :)

Go download it here

Please let us know if you love the new release and what you want next ;))

Did more coding (and vacation ;)) the last days than keeping you informed here about the current progress of my projects. So here some update:

Let me start with the most important and greatest news I (we...) have: PidginSnarl 2.0 is on its way since I got some really, really great help from Utek (or at Twitter: @utek). He already spent quite some time on the very long missed and most wanted feature. So PidginSnarl 2.0 is finally going to have the ability for opening a conversation with someone when you click on his "... signed on" notification. So I want to ask you to provide some testing for him as I myself will be in the mountains for vacations for a few days and have no Windows with me. The current dev version already works fine on my Windows 7 :)

Next is my new personal main project as I need it desperately myself - my Desktop Google Reader. SInce some days the final version 1.0 is out and my progress on 1.1 is quite good already so I am confident that 1.1 could hit the streets within one or two weeks (mostly because of mountains and no Windows again ;)). Having started there mainly to just have a RSS reader with Google Reader sync and Snarl notifications I repriorized myself in this project already and now my extended goal is to make it a full featured reader which could compete with the (very few I have to say) Windows Google Reader clients. Once again I would be happy to get some feedback on my own wishlist - so if you are interested let me know in this discussion what your main wishes are (right now I go through my ideas based on my own priorization and how hard it is to code them for me :))

FireSnarl has finally been approved on mozilla.org and is now listed there as non experimental. I also planned to release ThunderSnarl 1.1 with Thunderbird 3 support but just when I only wanted to comment out some testing code and package it I stumbled over some broken data as my USB stick recently broke and now I know which files were affected by that. Still on the map for the very new future as I am happy having my code in version control ;))

As you might know I am also working directly for Snarl (no, not the coding itself) and while doing so I released some code on GitHub which is my new primary place to share my open source. There you find in the moment implementations of the SNP (Snarl Network Protocol) in Perl and C#, a Snarl style which will forward your notifications to Twitter and WiFiSnarler.

WiFiSnarler? This is an unfinished small tool which is able to scan your area for wireless networks and if it finds new once displays notifications (including WiFi name and signal strength). The code you can find there is working already but has some rough edges, debugging code in it and could be called something like an alpha version. I don't plan (at least in the moment) to work on this - so I released my current state so that some developer knowing C# could finish this tool.

So, for now I am hoping to have good weather conditions the next days when traveling to the mountains :) See you soon

Lifehacker just decided to declare a battle where I don't want to see one - but now the voting is there so I wanna ask you to vote for your favourite notification system...

I have wrote some words about that in the Snarl discussion group already so maybe we can talk there a little bit about this topic...? ;)

Desktop Google Reader is a .NET based client for the popular Google Reader. It shows your all your unread feeds an items both in the application and as Snarl notifications. You can mark the news items as stared, view them in your default browser and mark them as read. Additonal you can subscribe to new feed.

Twoc? "Two weeks of code"! While being sad that I will be lonely the next two weeks because my lovely family is going to make some holidays while I stay at home working there is at least one positive thing about this: I will have some free evenings...

So starting on monday you can expect some new releases of software every few days here - and if you have wishes this could be the perfect time to tell them... ;)

But it's not that I didn't do nothing at all the last days (had few train rides so) - so here is what is new:

Chris just put together a small tutorial on how to write an own extension as DLL (meaning with much more possibilities that with the EZ ones.) We are now working together to polish this documentation and include at least two documented examples in VB6 and C#. And how do you (me ;)) learn something? Right - trying to build something with it so I released a first version of a Snarl style which forwards your notification to Twitter (credentials are asked for on first use).

If you want to develop your own style using C# and don't want to wait the next days let me know and I'll give you a link to the current version of my documentation (which is 99% finished!).

So having known that I will have those weeks soon I collected my ideas what to do - and the list is longer than the two weeks last I have to say...

• Add compatibility to Thunderbird 3 Beta 3 to ThunderSnarl
  • while the documentation is (as most of the time with Thunderbird :() a nightmare I already have single and summarized email alerts back working already - but some special features like per folder filtering need more work
    done
  • the folder filtering is not working with POP3 accounts so this one will be fixed too
    done
• Adding auto update notifications to at least all my C# based apps
• GRaiN - the notifier for Google Reader - shall get the feature to fire notification for every single new item but not only one saying how many are new. This became more important for me personally right now as NewsGator forces me to switch to Google Reader now...
• the Snarl homepage shall feature only screenshots of the current Snarl 2.2 release including all new styles
  done
• wanna finally finish SiFiEx 0.5 0.6 as an example on how to fire notifications out of a webpage using JSON and the new Firefox-AddOn Yip
  done - see GitHub
• reorganize the dev area on the Snarl homepage (e. g. own area for styles development)
  done
• finish as much wishes and ideas brought to me by you per mail, Twitter, comments or User Voice...
• add some more documentation for my own apps
• create a more attractive desgin for this homepage and It's short description of my apps
• just got confirmation that my Google Wave account is going to be activated soon... ;)
• "my great plan for a great app" (TM) - I know what I would like to have, how it shall look like and all of it's features (which of course includes Snarl support ;)). So this could be alone work of some months...

See that this list is longer than two weeks (even more because I am on talking about the evenings...? So if you want to priorize something let me know and I will have a look ;)

Ah - one more thing about Pidgin support. I am still stuck with the top missing feature to make more sophisticated actions when you click a notification. Because this is all done in C (which is something I do know very, very few of...) I would need some help if this should be implemented in a 1.1 release. So you know C? I know the Pidgin API and the Snarl API and know in theory how to bring them together... But the real great news (at least for myself ;)) is I know already what PidginSnarl 2.0 will be (most probably it won't be have this name...) but this will take some more time because I need to wait for some really great work of another programmer to be finished. This will be great if everything will get as hoped (and the programmer is right on track and very friendly and open. Thanks also on this way to Wade ;))