As we are getting very close to the release of Nymphicus 1.0 there is one last of the important features I do wanna feature here in this blog.

So let’s talk about notifications. For Mac users the concept of Growl is widely known. On Windows Snarl does something similar (and is now compatible with the newly created Growl API which still waits for its start on the Mac itself). So Growl and Snarl are central notification providers. They offer applications (like Nymphicus) to use them to deliver notifications to the user.

The main thing about using a centralized system over own implementation is unity. You have one single place where you administer all your notifications from different apps – like the used layout, the display time and so on. Some examples of different styles can be found here and here.

That said I today want to focus on the Windows version as its notification support is more advanced currently than the one of the Mac version (this will be true for 1.0 and they will get equal in a later version) as me being a long time supporter / contributor of Snarl (more or less all my apps use Snarl).

So Nymphicus for Windows uses the latest features of Snarl which have started working in Snarl 2.4.1 (which is round about one week old). But step by step.

In Snarl you have the concept of notification classes for different types of notifications. The user than is able to define to have different behavior on different classes (e. g. show search results only 5 seconds but show direct messages sticky, blinking red and forward them to your iPhone). Nymphicus registers a class for any possible notification type meaning every account has own classes for timeline, mentions, retweets and direct messages plus every single saved search has its own class and every single subscribed list has its own class. As an example see my Snarl setup – I have many, many classes and treat them quite differently.

One of the big features of both Growl and Snarl is the possibility to forward notifications. The two most important ones are for sure the possibilities to forward them to your iPhone or Android phone as push notifications.

And finally one of the newest features of Snarl 2.4 are actions – this let’s the application define an own context menu on each notification for commands the user can start right out of the notification. Nymphicus registers the four actions “Reply”, “Retweet”, “Write Direct Message” and “Favorite”. So you can initiate those actions directly out of the notification without Nymphicus even being in foreground.

I want to thank Toke for providing state of the art .NET functions to use the newest APIs and fulfilling my wishes about how actions are handled. And in general want to thank Chris for Snarl itself which was my own personal starting point in developing desktop applications.

The Mac version uses Growl integration:

As the release of Nymphicus 1.0 is getting closer quite fast the today’s teaser is about the “top secret” feature of Nymphicus which makes Nymphicus different to all other Twitter clients.

The starting point of Nymphicus has been me being very unhappy with all available Twitter clients if you have multiple accounts, saved searches or lists. You either have clients where you always click between different lists of items (e. g. the official Twitter client / Tweetie) or have quite big windows with multiple lists which fill more or less your entire screen (like Tweetdeck).

So my idea has been to create a new way the user can customize easily what is the most important to him (or her) to get exactly those items displayed in one single list at once while hiding the not so important stuff in another view. I think I’ll start by giving you two screenshots of the view preferences in both the Mac and Windows version to give you a first idea what it looks like:

So the concept of a view is to collect all the different types of tweets from all you accounts, lists and searches and view them together. To give you some examples I list here some views we already use ourself:

• All main data: All timelines, mentions, direct messages and retweets from all our accounts
• Chat: All mentions and direct messages from all accounts (so in this view you have everything together you may need/want to answer
• Nymphicus: Here we collect all from the account @liGhun plus some searches like “#Nymphicus” and a list with all beta testers of Nymphicus to not miss news about Nymphicus
• 
• Snarl: As me being contributor for Snarl on Windows I have a view which combines @TlhanGhun, @SnarlNotifier and some searches like “#snarl” plus I do have some lists where I collect users known to be power users of Snarl
• Lists: A collection of all lists I am subscribed to

I think you got it now. On daily use I am now able to see fast all the items which I am interested right now without having to fill my screen with a big client or needing to click to different accounts and subtypes all the time.

The main window has a dropdown where you can choose to change the currently displayed view easily.

As a bonus point Nymphicus also has the ability to filter within views – so you can define which accounts and/or words you don’t want to see in you view while they might be interesting in another view.

Just in front of a new week in the office teaser 3 of the upcoming Twitter client Nymphicus is here.

Today we’ll have a look at the link and image management in Nymphicus. So let’s start with the links:

Nymphicus supports some different link shortening services to shorten links in your tweet.

(Mac)

(Windows)

This one part of the link management. On the other hand Nymphicus is able to decode most of the available link shortener and you get a tooltip over the link about its real destination.

(Mac)

As an alternative you can choose that the extracted link shall be displayed direct in the tweet display so you can see it directly.

(Windows)

As with link shorteners it is quite similar with the image services. You can choose several of them for image uploading:

(Mac)

(Windows)

And also images are extracted and are displayed in a tooltip for a short first look at them.

(Mac)

(Windows)

In general I want to note that Nymphicus can extract much more servies (both link shortener and image uploaders) – not only the few it can use to shorten / upload. The architecture is quite open open – if the ultimate service may occur we can be fast to use it 🙂

As promissed on my last blog entry I will continue to feature some of the features of Nymphicus every few days. Of course the main unique feature itself will be the last one. Today we’ll have a look at the lists support built into Nymphicus.

Lists are one of the Twitter features which nearly nobody really uses as nobody knows about them and most clients just don’t really support them. This was true for myself too – I had a typical “TestList” on my account, added some users and never came back.

While implementing the list features (remember the promise that Nymphicus will support all available new features of Twitter?) and thinking where I could need lists in my client I simply added it everywhere where it made sense to me and just right now I started using lists personally as I just can reach them quite easily and fast.

Nymphicus has a complete lists management – meaning you can create lists, remove lists add users to lists and also remove users from lists. This is where I started – implement all available features in one list configuration window. But now I add lists support to all places where it makes sense to me (and I might find some more over the time). The main thing is that I have a user info dialog showing all about a users (number of tweets, following status and so on). In Nymphicus you can directly out of this window add this user to one of your lists. Or even better: you can create a list right there and add the use instantly to it.

The main thing why lists are more fun than with any other client (or even the Twitter homepage) is the main concept of Nymphicus which is called “Views”. But this feature will be explained another time…

Follow @liGhun to stay informed about all the current progress – less than a month until planned release date…

Long time no blog post. But the reason is we have been focused in getting both Nymphicus versions (Windows and Mac) ready for a 1.0 release. I am today happy to officially tell you that we have the plan to release them in early June to the public. Here are the two official icons – first the one for Windows, second the one for the Mac

Until then I will give you some short teasers in various blog posts about some of the main features that make Nymphicus that special.

Let’s start today with filters. In Nymphicus you can define both blacklist and whitelist filters to be applied on all your views (what a view is will be explained in a later blog post). Every filter can search for texts within the username, the text or both. If it is a blacklist filter the tweet won’t be displayed – if it is a whitelist filter is is shown regardless if a following blacklist would hit it.

Filters are serial – you can apply as many as you want in a row.

If you want to get access to a beta version we will be happy to give you access to a test version. Beta testers filing at least one bug report will get the final release with a 50% discount on Windows – I hope we can do so on the Mac too but we are new to the App Store and first need to figure out if / how this might be done there.

We are very happy that starting today both the Mac as also the Windows version of Nymphicus have been sent to some initial testers. Neither is this release finished nor is it working 100% as expected – but the main features are all working and now we are more and more working on optimization, stabilization and adding the last missing features. If you want to be one of the early testers just drop us a mail 🙂

Sadly I have to postpone Winslew 1.6 for one week as a bad cold has hit during the last days and because of the headache I have not been able to make the last adjustments and tests to feel good about a stable and fast release. So Winslew 1.6 now scheduled for first weekend in March – sorry for that. As Winslew comes with Webkit as rendering engine the test cycle on different Windows setups became much more urgent than before as this code includes low level functions which have more options to crash at all…

Michael and I are both having quite some fun on the great progress we already make on both Nymphicus for Mac and Windows. Both versions are now already complete in terms of basic Twitter features like seeing the timeline, writing new tweets, replies or direct messages, retweeting and favorite items. So I decided to take some minutes today to give you out there some more first tweaks on what will be coming.

So I added some more information to the Nymphicus main page itself and also added a first short FAQ for Nymphicus. The best way to get the latest updates is to follow our Twitter account @liGhun as we will send screenshots and more there to the public…

I did mention it sometimes already but didn’t really say it loud: lI’ Ghun now is no more a single person project place – I want to happily tell you that a good friend of mine has joined li’ Ghun recently and we are working together and in parallel on Nymphicus on both platforms. Say hello to Michael 🙂

To give you a first very rough feeling on what to get – but this is work in progress so the concepts will stay but the polish will come later

Stay tuned..