My Feed Notifier application has been a relative success. It’s the only app I’ve created that continues to get hundreds of downloads every month, just by people finding it on my blog from search engines. I’ve also received dozens of feature requests and have some ideas of my own. So, I’ve been wanting to create version 2 of this simple but useful application and I’ve finally started just that. For starters, the system tray pop-ups are getting a revamped look and feel, including user-selectable themes. Here’s a sneak peek at my work in progress…
Feed Notifier 2.0 - Sneak Peek
Some things to note about the new pop-up design:
- The pop-ups are actually rendered using the Internet Explorer ActiveX plugin, meaning it will be easy to support and add new user-configurable themes.
- The age of the post is now shown, as well as the author. (“21 days ago by George Sakkis”)
- You can navigate through the items with the controls on the bottom.
- The favicon for the feed will be shown in the top-left corner, if available.
- The pop-up can be closed at any time with the icon on the top-right.
- The play/pause controls enable/disable automatic stepping through the items.
I’m writing most of the code from scratch, so it may take some time before this release is available. I’ll keep you posted.
This is looking really cool!
Looks good indeed. :)
Thanks Michael for working on a v2.
Here’s a small suggestion, is it possible to allow users to customize the “pop-up duration” to 0 or “Never auto close” such that the pop-up will never timeout and close automatically, but will instead wait for manual user intervention to dismiss it?
In that way, it can be used to monitor important system alerts that must be acted upon.
Nox: Yep, that feature is on my to-do list for version 2, since it was requested at least a few times. :)
Hi!
Looking forward to release 2.0.
Some future requests:
* Set the Entry Cache to 0 (or 1), so you can use the application to display imortant messages from only one RSS feed.
* Set the Polling Interval down to 1 minute.
The entry cache is there so the notifier knows which items it has already seen. If you set it to 0, you’d get duplicate notifications for the same items every time the feed is polled. Are you sure that’s what you want?
No, probably not :-)
How about the ability the set it to 1?
Hi Michael, I’ve installed v2 and I like it. :) Btw, the “do not auto dismiss pop-up” feature hasn’t been implemented yet, right?
Thanks for a great job! :)
It has been implemented. Uncheck “Auto-play new items” in the Pop-ups section of the preferences.
Thanks Michael. It is indeed working perfectly. Well done!
Oh btw, I was trying to add the Google Apps Status Dashboard feed http://www.google.com/appsstatus/rss/en but it wasn’t recognised as a valid RSS/Atom feed.