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:
