The best thing to get something out of me is by approaching me directly. So David ‘lager’ Underhill did the right thing when he shot me an email about the latest version of Full Phat's Snarl, a notification system inspired by Growl for OSX.

I haven't posted about Snarl yet, as I was a bit puzzled with the previous version. According to the press release and the blurbs on its site, it's some sort of noticification system. So, I then wonder, does it run on its own, can I, as an end-user, use this, or is this solely something for developers to implement in their apps?

“Snarl is a notification system inspired by Growl that allows applications to display a nice alpha-blended message on the screen.”

“Unlike other forms of notification, Snarl does not hijack the current focused window, nor does it force the taskbar to be visible. Notifications can either be cancelled by clicking on them, or left to disappear automatically if ignored for a period of time.

Snarl can display many message at any one time; new messages are simply displayed beneath existing ones. The application displaying the message can also update the content at any time, remove the message, or specify an icon to be displayed.

Best of all, developers of other applications can include Snarl support in their applications with almost no effort at all — Snarl uses Windows window messaging functionality to show and hide notifications, making it accessible to any programming language from pure C to Visual Basic or .net-based environments.

Changes

• Minor bugfixes

• New app ‘SnarlTunes’ displays artist and song information when current playing track in iTunes changes”

The only way to find out is to try for yourself. It turns out that Snarl is exactly what it says it is, a notification system. This means that it does little on its own. The installer comes with two small sample programs that use Snarl, a clock and an app that generates notifications of the currently playing app in iTunes, along with an SDK for developers.

The message clouds are skinnable. They consist of PNG images for the icon and the background. At the moment the only way to change skins seems to be by replacing the images.

A system as Snarl is dependent on the apps that make use of it. So let's hope it there are devs out there that find this interesting, lest it'll go nowhere. || craeonics | comments (7)

k23's widget engine dotWidget 0.8 came out three weeks ago and I totally forgot to post about it. Luckily, a minor update, 0.8.1 was posted a couple of days ago, so here's the reprise.

Starting with 8.0:

“dotWidget R0.8 is finally out! Rather than get bogged-down in public betas, we've gone for a full-blown release instead so download it, try it out, and get involved in making dotWidget the most popular Widget app for Windows there is!

A brief overview of the (many) changes and improvements:

• Massively re-written

• Completely new api

• Fully backwards-compatible with R0.6

• Loads of new features

• Suite of actually useful widgets (RSS feed, weather, etc.)

• Faster, smoother

• Supports multiple users correctly”

And continueing with 0.8.1:

“This is a minor upgrade that fixes a number of small cosmetic issues and also introduces new functionality required by some forthcoming widgets. A brief overview of the changes made is as follows:

• Fixed bug where sometimes a widget's gripper would remain visible even after the widget lost the keyboard focus.

• Added new ‘Bounds’ and ‘Frame’ properties to Widget object.

• Added new ‘Take Snapshot’ option to Widget Menu (V41 engine widgets only). When selected, a PNG snapshot of the widget is saved into ‘My documents/dotWidgets/snapshots’ as ‘[WidgetName]-snapshot.png’.

• dotWidgets folder now has a customised icon (XP only at the moment).

• New melon script objects used by some forthcoming widgets now automatically installed.

• Settings should now be saved correctly if dotWidget is running when the computer reboots or the user logs off.”

The best bit ofcourse is this snippet:

“dotWidget doesn't rely on large additional downloads, such as the .net framework. XP users should find themselves up and running instantly”

No bloat, free, sexy, what are ya'll waiting for? || craeonics | comments (23)

Back in the days, there used to be this girl that would disappear from the Net for months, pop in to post a ‘I'm not dead’ thread on a board somewhere and then disappear again.

Well, this is not going to be one of those posts. Just a little bit behind on things. Fortunately, nothing ever happens in Skindom these days, so there's little catching up to do.

Onwards with the story, Stick is an innovative little app that does a couple of things right, but isn't really functional enough to use daily. Or at least, not for me.

Stick is a collection of skinnable tabs that collapse to the side of the screen. These tabs can be note tabs, browser tabs (as in: IE in a tab), calendar tabs and RSS tabs. None of those interest me. No, what interests me about Stick is the final type of tab: file manager tabs.

You see, I'm not quite sure if the OSX incarnations of MacOS still have this feature, but MacOSes of yore used to have these kinds of tabbed folders. And they worked quite well too. No need to hassle with taskbars and what not, just hit the right tab and it would pop open. Hit it again and it would close again.

But there's more potential in this: tabbed windows. Examine this screenshot of *nix window manager FluxBox I stole from their site:

FluxBox lets you group independent apps together as tabs, giving new meaning to the term ‘task management’.

That is so awesome. If I ever were to switch to *nix (and get things up and running with my hardware), this would be the first thing I'd be checking out. There is so much wasted space in the title bar, it could be collapsed to BeOS like proportions and if those were bundled with tabs like this, I'd go out of my mind.

Ofcourse, seeing that the majority of Windows users maximise every bloody screen they can, advanced window mechanics like this will be a distant, implausible future on this platform.

Back to Stick. The difference between what Stick does and what FluxBox does, tabwise, is that in FluxBox every damn app that has a window will have all tabbing functionality available, whereas in the case of Stick, the tabs are components of Stick. Plugins, so to speak. And the file manager plug in isn't that advanced, to be honest.

For instance, it doesn't remember the directory you were in when you restart the app. Granted, neither does Explorer, but the more advanced alternatives certainly do (and have spoiled me to no end). It does have sexy open/collapse op focus/blur functions though. So that somewhat makes up for it.

If only Stick had been a generic tab ‘solution’, applicable to all windows, instead of a set of specific plugins. That, to put it in the words of Carlito, that would be cool. || craeonics | comments (6)