I am very happy that my own topmost wanted feature is now included into Nymphicus for Windows. Starting with 1.4 Nymphicus now syncs the current state of your read tweets using the great service Tweet Marker. This means if you both use a Twitter client like Tweetbot on the iPhone and Nymphicus for Windows they both scroll to the same position where you stopped reading in the other client.

But it doesn’t stop here – just when I was about to go over to my work on Nymphicus 2.0 one of my favorite new social services called QUOTE.fm announced that they are going to release an API. Of course I immediately started to create a .NET client to QUOTE.fm (and released it as Open Source) and integrated it fully into Nymphicus with all its advantages like Views, filters and so on. QUOTE.fm is all about quoting articles in the web – just head over to there website and get an account now. As you might know me I created a short video (OK, it’s more than four minutes) to show all the integration of QUOTE.fm into Nymphicus.

Great new stuff, isn’t it? And we have even more.

First I have to say we missed a feature of Twitter more or less completely (since we used it differently than many other users): The favorites had been second class citizens. From now on they are first class citizens which means they are fetched seperately (meaning you get many from the past), can be selected in Views and do have an own filter quick filter button.

Second I extended Facebook in an important way: Now all comments are fetched on first retrieval which brings us to the point that Nymphicus knows if you liked or commented an entry yourself or not. And this is very important as you now can tune your Snarl settings to handle them different (e. g. just don’t show them if you didn’t like or comment the status).

Finally a small (one line of code!) but important change: the limitation to have only two streaming Twitter accounts is gone. And because of this we need much less API calls (which are rate limited) and so the update interval goes down from four minutes to 90 seconds.

First of all thanks to all the users and testers having given feedback in the last months and weeks. As a result I have collected quite some ideas about what a Nymphicus 2.0 would be.

The short version: it’s about design.

First of all my current plans include to get rid of most of the many buttons we now have (and thanks to your feedback already know where it will be going). Back when Nymphicus “only” used to be a Twitter client the buttons made sense and were not that many. But with extending to Facebook and Google Reader (and maybe more in the future…) the buttons flooded the interface.

Second is composing messages. A quite often wish has been to include the compose textbox directly into the window instead of opening a new small one – so composing is now be planned to be on bottom of the main window.

Third is multi column view. It took quite some time till some of you finally convinced me that Nymphicus should have the option(!) that more than one View should be shown at once. This is – as seen from the coding – a small step but it’ll change dramtically who might be happy with Nymphicus (as it’ll be optional it’s about more happy users.

Fourth is the final completion of the longterm wish about integrating Tweet Marker. In this case all the API calling stuff is already in Nymphicus since many months but it has not been easy to bring the Views concept together with traditional approach of Tweet Marker (one column per type). I have now the concepts but it will be quite some coding till it’ll work. But maybe (depending on my free time the next weeks – all this stuff here is my hobby next to my fulltime job…) I might put an intermediate 1.4 with “only” this feature. But this is no promise…!

Fifth is something I am not sure right now. The downside is the number of known installations and the number of received license purchases – well – differs a little bit to much in my opinion so I think about adding payment reminders within the Views (something like every 50th entry or so). This is something I would like to avoid but in the end it looks like… 🙁

Finally a personal note: thank you guys for using & feedback – I really appreciate every feedback!

While working on the next major update of Nymphicus for Windows with its than to be reorganized user interface I decided to release an intermediate release with some smaller enhancements.

First we have now a “mark as read” feature available so you can see what you already made (which will be even greater later on when Tweet Marker will be activated).

Second is the enhanced conversation view. The old one was great but no one did find the buttons to activate it. Additionally you can now also see conversation which have not been your own.

Finally the user icons in Twitter are now cached to your local hard disk and because of this Nymphicus is even faster than it has been already.

As always I created a short video to show you the new functions on actions:

Now that the internal interfaces in Nymphicus for Windows have been successfully updated to be as flexible as possible to integrate new services into Nymphicus the main question for me is: where to start?

Of course Google+ would be my first choice but Google still has no real API to access it – I really can’t see what they are thinking about how to become a competitor of Twitter and Facebook if they miss such an important feature. And as far as I can say the Google+ usage is already decreasing 🙁

So I picked up a user request and decided to add something completely different for a combination unseen on the market right now. I do now add Google Reader directly into Nymphicus (including the complete Views-concept and so on). The great thing that my first own bigger desktop app I ever did is my open source client to Google Reader so I have the integration done already for simple retrieval of unread items. I plan right now to make a small release quite soon with this simple solution and then go a step forward.

This step will mean I already invested now quite some hours into my next (and planned since many years…) project which will be called Meneré. Meneré will be a feature complete Google Reader client with a complete new underlying library for communicating with Google Reader.

In general you can top wishes about services, social networks and so on now you want to have been added. LinkedIn will be sure one of the next too…

Yes, Nymphicus for Windows 1.2.1 is already out and has quite many new featues:

• When composing a Tweet an autocomplete for Twitter username and hashtags is now included (UserVoice 2364163)
• When notification via streaming about deletion of a status by another user is received this status is removed from Nymphicus
• You can delete now your own tweets
• You can now edit your own tweets (which in fact deletes the old one and posts a new one)
• Minimize to tray option added (UserVoice 1091051)
• bit.ly url shortening added (login needed – former bit.ly Pro)
• New notications (if Snarl is used):
• – new follower (UserVoice 2364157)
• – item favorited
• Snarl / notifications part in the preferences as many user miss that feature till now
• UserInfo dialog now has compose mention and compose dm buttons (UserVoice 2427292)
• CPU consumption now really dramatically reduced in all cases
• RAM consumption reduced (more to come in next releases)
• Setup info text if .NET 4.0 is not installed now much more friendly

Or have a look at the video showing the most important changes:

Today Nymphicus for Windows has been released. See the following video on what’s new:

So what is new in 1.2 compared to 1.1.4?

• Facebook integration added
• If Snarl is started after Nymphicus (or restarted during run time) app and classes are now (re)registered
• Filter now can be applied on the sending application/client name (both Twitter and Facebook)
• Deactivating a filter in a view definition now immediately brings back items which were hidden because of this filter
• Buttons overlay for user image now with animation. This makes the delay until the main window is responding on mouse on startup much smaller
• Pressing the fav button on a tweet now a background thread – user interface stays accessible
• Account selector (e. g. in compose or search window) now shows the account color
• On various points the fullname instead of only username is shown (as Facebook username often is only a number)
• Replying on item with multiple Twitter accounts being mentioned: done as reply all with the additional username selected to easily remove them by just starting to write
• Conversation view: see the full conversation on replies and direct messages by pressing the small message type icon
• Speed and performance optimizations
• Snarl notifications on inital fetch now reliable not being displayed (no more screen flooding)
• Smooth scrolling now disabled – now changing the current view is more or less instant and the filter box is back to filter as you type (you don’t need hit enter anymore.
  This is a massive (!) performance boost but anyway if you liked to old smooth scrolling you can reenable it in the preferences
• Compose window opens now at the same location as the main window
• Fix: Recent tweets in UserInfo window was unreliable