I Had to Test Sparkle (MoodBlast 2.1)

Well, it appears the auto-updates work, after a little bump that hopefully nobody noticed. The new version improves MoodBlast’s ability to return to the previous foreground window when the panel is closed, instead of forcing you to grab your mouse or ⌘-⇥ to it. I did forget to mention one feature in the previous post: MoodBlast now downcases the first letter of a string when posting to Facebook. Given the way Facebook displays your mood (Brett Terpstra is…), it looked awkward to have a capital in the middle of the sentence and was inconvenient to have to post sentences beginning with lowercase letters to every other service. So now you can just start your sentence with a capital letter and let MoodBlast handle the rest. While I’m writing, I thought I’d give you a list of up and coming features, as well as some hopes for the not-too-distant future…

Current Projects

I’m currently working on being able to recall window state and position between launches. So if you have a favorite location for the MoodBlast window to appear, it will remember it from launch to launch. You can already start hidden or visible, but this will be a step forward. I’m struggling to make it work with *my* setup, where I’m constantly changing my monitors between laptop, home external and work external. I need to get it to position relatively, but I’ll get there.

I’ve implemented a basic UTF-8 URL encoding system, so it won’t destroy most extended characters when posting to web services. I’m pretty sure it still chokes on Kanji text for some reason, and I’m working to fix it. First step, install the language packs I skipped so that I can actually test it.

I had originally implemented a full autocomplete system that remembered everything you typed and would autocomplete words and phrases based on your history. Problem was, if there were multiple choices and the dropdown menu came up, hitting space would select a menu item instead of inserting a space. So if you had “Alabama” in your history and you just wanted to type “A nice thing”, pressing A and then space would insert “Alabama” and you’d have to backspace it. Not good. So, as a compromise, I’d like to at least have the history menu available on a down arrow press. I haven’t figured out why I can’t do that yet. But I will.

Not Too Far Off

This one’s a big one: Applescript support. This will give users the ability to add script “plugins” to MoodBlast to interface with programs ranging from Apple Mail to iTunes, even Salling Clicker. Any program that can send or trigger Applescript would be able to send a MoodBlast. Basically, I only need to add a command to set the text, and a command to select the services. The rest is already handled.

Plazes support, and location support in general for services that support it. I’m thinking a simple @keyword evolution could allow for location strings to be sent selectively.

I had a stroke of genius. If I can implement this one, I’ll have to start charging. It’s a “BRB Boss Key”. Basically, you could set a second hotkey that would send a configurable brb message to all open chat clients, set your “away” status, and show the desktop or activate a selected application. It would be of great use to my photographer who chats constantly at work and either has terrible reflexes or just assumes that he’s too valuable to replace. This, for him, would be job security. I mean, all I’m asking for is a little effort…

And lastly, I’m still playing around with the idea of configurable service presets. I don’t know if they should be triggered by hotkeys, strings, a right click menu… but whatever implementation I settle on, I’d like to be able to set combinations of services and save them to my defaults for future use. One possibility is to be able to set your combination and then right click and choose “Save Combination” from a context menu, give it a name, and then be able to access it by including it at the end of a string with a symbol. Maybe…

Anyway… Sparkle seems to be working, so the automatic updates should keep all the MoodBlast users happy for a while.