Watcher
Last night at around 1:00 a.m., A friend and I were discussing an application that watched a Flickr RSS feed and popped-up IM-alert style notifications when new photos were posted.
Over the course of the next 8 hours or so, Watcher was born.
It’s my first released application written in wxPython. It’s crude and the UI layout is amateurish, but it does appear to work.
It’s also the first time I’ve employed NSIS’s new “Modern UI” macros.
January 10th, 2005 at 11:16 am
Is there anywhere to file bug reports or suggestions? I set it up to pull pictures and it showed them really fast (owing to the low default of 2 seconds for the photo interval). I went in and changed that setting to 5 seconds and hit “apply”. The pictures I had already seen (the ones that went by really fast) came up again. On one hand it was handy that it went back to show those pics. On the other hand is it right for it to go and show you all those pictures again just for tweaking a setting?
January 10th, 2005 at 11:44 am
This is as good a place as any to post comments or bug reports for now.
I waffled back and forth on when it should toss its RSS bookmark information. Initially it didn’t, but it was frustrating to make a chance and then not see anything happen. I thought about having Apply only do so when the RSS feed changed and then having a menu option or another button to reset it manually.
I left it on Apply and didn’t add the new button for the time being because it was simple and the consequences of seeing the photos again after making a prefs change didn’t seem bad.
Do you disagree? Like I said, it was not an obvious call to me.
January 11th, 2005 at 12:03 am
Like I said, it was actually fortunate in my case since I didn’t see the pictures the first time anyway. So maybe leave it until someone has a legitimate beef about it.
January 12th, 2005 at 9:45 am
This is a suggestion, not a bug. It would appear flickr has it’s own way of conveying the image URL, so trying to feed Watcher any other RSS feeds doesn’t work (unless, of course, they do things the way flickr does). It would be cool to be able to use any RSS feed and have some way of telling Watcher where to find the image URL within the
January 12th, 2005 at 9:47 am
That wasn’t very nice of WordPress. It’s hiding the tags I typed in because I didn’t HTML encode them. In any case, the first element I mentioned was supposed to be the <link> element and the second one is the <enclosure> element.