Just a quick post to provide an update on the next version of Trowl.
Preview builds are now available. I waited until things seemed relatively stable, so if you want to give 0.7 a whirl, you shouldn’t experience too many problems. Of course, if you do, I’d love to hear about it. Then I can fix it and everything will be happy again. :)
While 0.7 is mostly finished, there are still a few small features that I’d like to add. I didn’t want the preview builds to get held up by these last few changes, but you can expect a couple more goodies to slip through before things are finalized.
So, what are those features? Thank you for asking, imaginary commenter!
* New "Event" notification. (NOW AVAILABLE in build 002) The user stream sends more than just tweets — it also sends notifications about new followers, retweets and favorites. So it only seemed appropriate to pass those notifications on to Growl. As new notifications get sent to the stream, I’ll integrate them into this notification type.
* Complete t.co integration. (NOW AVAILABLE in build 003) Twitter is finally starting to push ahead with implementing its t.co URL "shortening" service to the rest of its ecosystem. To that end, Trowl will behave slightly differently when posting a tweet with URLs. Each URL will automatically deduct ~19 characters from your tweet, no matter how long the URL is. My current plan is to keep the built-in is.gd shortening available for those who like to use that, but it’ll probably become less important as t.co becomes more widespread.
* Photo uploads. (NOW AVAILABLE in build 004) I think everyone knows what this is now that Twitter has rolled it out to everyone on the Twitter website. It is not yet (officially) part of the API, though, and currently Twitter has no date planned for a roll out. (So much for late June.) Like mentioned above, this may or may not make it into 0.7 depending on how long this takes.
* Higher resolution profile pictures. (NOW AVAILABLE in build 005) Profile pictures will now be 200 by 200 pixels, if possible. A lot of profile pictures aren’t that large when pulled from Twitter, so some changes were made to how the retweet profile pictures are composed. Overall, though, you shouldn’t notice too much of a difference unless you are using a Growl display that shows large images, or you forward notifications to another device, like Howl on iPhone. Metro Display was changed to show a larger version of the profile picture if you hover your mouse over the profile picture.
Thoughts, questions, suggestions? Feel free to comment. :)