BlogBridge 2.19 Weekly Development Release
It’s Friday and we release another BlogBridge Weekly Development Release: Version 2.19. This version features several tasty things and here I would like to highlight some.
The most noticable and nice of them is Activity Alerts. Activity Alerts is our cool name for different event notifications given when you don’t see the application window (it’’s either minimized or otherwise hidden). We opened the season by reporting two kinds of events: when new articles arrive and when new feeds are added to the reading lists you are subscribed to.
Notifications itself appear in a platform-specific way. On Mac OS X you need Growl (http://www.growl.info/) to see some nice balloons. Growl is a handy Mac OS X utility that does, well, notifications.
On Windows and Linux a small BlogBridge icon appears in the notifications area and a popup message is displayed near it. Please note that Windows and Linux users need at least Java 6 (which is still in Beta state at the moment) to see any notifications and notifications related options.
This is due to the fact that we always need some cross-platform way of doing things as we have to support many different systems and the only way to stay independent of any native code injections is to use only standard means.
You can enable or disable notifications using global preferences (Notifications tab).
Look to this new tab as we add more notification options. By the way, if you don’t see the tab, you can’t have notifications because of your Java version. Sorry.
Every Guide also has this tab where you can allow the engine monitor this Guide for new feeds and feeds in it for new articles or disallow to do so.
The other small enahncement is that we added an intersting new link (http://www.blogbridge.com/rl/public.opml). It lists all public reading lists our users have published. It’s the shortest and the easiest way to expose your lists. Now when you publish your list in BlogBridge you can set a “public” flag and the record about your reading list will show up in that small directory (By default, all reading lists are marked as private and none of the previously published ones will be exposed, so don’’t worry.)
Enjoy the updates and let us know what you think! We are very open to comments and suggestions as usual.
If you are curious and courageous, Click here to download and run the latest Weekly Development Release (on any platform).
Nice! Good to see Growl notifications! Now, if only there was a way to open links in the browser in the background…
Comment by D'Arcy Norman — May 19, 2006 @ 9:11 pm
Yeah, it’s the annoyance Number One on Windows.
If anyone has a quick recipe, don’t hesitate to share it. In the mean time, we’ll try to find one ourselves.
Comment by Aleksey Gureev — May 20, 2006 @ 1:14 am
Awesome. But where can i download Java Runtime Environment 6.0?
Comment by Dot — May 20, 2006 @ 3:29 am
The beta release is available here:
http://java.sun.com/downloads/ea/#j2se
Also there’s the most recent binary snapshot. Use whatever you feel better. Both should work fine.
Comment by Aleksey Gureev — May 20, 2006 @ 3:51 pm
I love the notifications, but had to disable them - too many Growl mini windows, each bragging that “Blogbridge has (small number of) new posts” - any way to aggregate all notifications for an entire update run? It seems to throw notifications at the guide level now (just guessing though)
Comment by D'Arcy Norman — May 22, 2006 @ 6:24 pm
I couldn’t find any way to update Growl notification which is already visible. So to lower the flood I decided to wait 5 seconds since lastly added article/feed and if there were no other events, display a summary balloon. Perhaps it was wrong direction.
We need another solution…
Comment by Aleksey Gureev — May 23, 2006 @ 1:05 am
Actually, D’Arcy and Aleksey, in Growl Preferences, under Applications, you can turn off “Sticky” for New Feeds and Articles” for BlogBridge and the notification fade away on their own…
Comment by Pito Salas — May 23, 2006 @ 2:42 pm
I think D’Arcy meant that when there are several events to report, the application shows balloons quicker than Growl hides them. On Windows, when I give the notification message while the previous message is displayed, the text is simply updated, not displayed along with the previous. With Growl another balloon pops up.
Comment by Aleksey Gureev — May 23, 2006 @ 3:09 pm