MoodBlast 3.0

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You’re currently reading “MoodBlast 3.0,” an entry on Circle Six Blog

• Published: 12.20.07 / 1pm
• Category: Geekery
• Comments: 40

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1. David 12.20.07 / 1pm

   Congrats on the release, ninja.
2. brett 12.20.07 / 2pm

   Thanks. The massive changes are causing, well, massive problems with the auto updater. If anyone is having trouble, you’ll want to download the new version manually and install. If you have further problems, trashing the 3 preference files in your user preferences directory generally solves them. Sorry for the inconvenience.
3. Scott Haug 12.21.07 / 12am

   The help document keeps crashing on me. I can bring up the main page, but if I click on the third link (Find out how the pros do it), the window stalls, briefly locks up the machine, then the window goes away unceremoniously.

   Fantastic release otherwise, and many thanks!
4. Brent O. 12.21.07 / 6am

   I probably have low standards since I only recently discovered MoodBlast, but 3.0 works for me! Great stuff. Thanks for developing it!
5. brett 12.21.07 / 8am

   @scott, that’s really strange and not happening on my end. I’m working on some new online documentation and screencasts right now, so a little patience will bypass the problem. I’m not sure what else to try, unless you’re still on Tiger?
6. Scott Haug 12.21.07 / 10am

   @brett, Leopard 10.5.1, MBP 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM

   The other help sections work fine.

   No worries. I’ll wait for the online docs. :)
7. brett 12.21.07 / 11am

   Ok, now I’m getting some weirdness. I somehow convinced it that it needed to look online for something and it’s hanging in the process on that page. I’ll see if I can get a fix out (and find out how borked the auto-updater is in the process).
8. Sonic 12.22.07 / 11am

   Clicking on the little pill in the menu bar no longer did anything after upgrading to 3.0.1. It’s asking for some sort growl notification app (after I did some resets and stuff), and when I click cancel, MB just crashes.

   Everything worked until I did the auto update for 3.0.1 this morning. Now even reverting to 3.0 does not work. Any ideas? I’m on PPC 10.4.11.
9. brett 12.22.07 / 12pm

   First, do you have Growl installed? If not, I highly recommend getting it.

   The menubar dysfunction is a long-standing oddity that happens, usually temporarily, and we’ve never been able to figure out the cause. Usually, killing MB and restarting will fix it, unless something more serious is going on. My best recommendation is to trash your prefs and launch MoodBlast again.

   The prefs are in /Users/yourname/Library/Preferences. There are three files, you can ignore the one that ends in _Facebook, but delete MoodBlast Prefs and com.circlesix.MoodBlast.plist

   Let me know…
10. Floris 12.22.07 / 7pm

    This is an awesome application, and I am happy to read there are plans for pownce and probably a few more social networks. It is so nice to have one single application that allows me to be more social with my social networks. I simply stopped using a lot until I heard Leo Laporte discuss it in his podcast.
11. Sonic 12.22.07 / 8pm

    Thanks Brett. I haven’t installed Growl yet, but I plan to. Second…I was able to fix the issue by first turning off the menu bar icon in the prefs and then turning it back on again. Not sure what happened, but that fixed my issue! However, I can’t make the dock icon show up yet…not too important to me now!
12. Håvard Pedersen 12.24.07 / 4pm

    Awesome release. The app is getting better and better. :) But the updater (3.0.3) is seriously broken. It opens the main window and the update window at the same time. And when I try to close the main window, the entire update process crashes and the app dies. :( If I recall correctly I had to do the last update by hand as well.
13. brett 12.24.07 / 5pm

    Were you upgrading from 3.0.2 to 3.0.3? I know there was a major problem jumping from 2.49.x to 3.0, but I’ve been able to run every update fine since getting over the 3.0 hump. Let me know what your previous version before the update was. Thanks!
14. Håvard Pedersen 12.25.07 / 10am

    My last update was from 3.0.2 to 3.0.3. The one before that was 2.49.x to 3.0.x.
15. alex 12.26.07 / 2pm

    any way to run this on XP? (are you aware of something like moodblaster for XP?)
16. brett 12.26.07 / 11pm

    @Håvard Due to the nature of MB (not having a main menu) and the way I’ve currently got it programmed, the main window needs to be open for any other windows to show up. So, don’t close the main window when the updater comes up, just move it out of the way and let the updater run. Does that work? I’m about to upload 3.0.4 to fix the current Metamark problem, so you can try it out with that.

    @alex, not yet, but I am planning a possible port. Google has something similar in the works, but I’ve forgotten what it’s called at the moment. I’m not sure anything this expansive is available yet on Windows, but I’m a little out of the Microsoft loop these days.
17. alex 12.27.07 / 10am

    that’d be awesome (yeah…15 minutes of google-ing and I couldn’t find anything at all similar for Windows).
    take care, alex
18. Håvard Pedersen 01.02.08 / 2pm

    The Facebook status still has “is” in front of it. The auto-update from 3.0.4 to 3.0.5 works fine, which is very good considering 3.0.5 isn’t linked up for manual download at all. :)
19. brett 01.02.08 / 2pm

    Updated the download page, thanks for catching that.

    Facebook inserts the “is” on external clients still, and I haven’t found an option to disable it. I’m actually a little relieved, as a good 20% of the code in MoodBlast was designed for working around that little quirk :). If they make the removal of the “is” a full, across-the-board feature, it should automatically happen for MoodBlast as I’m don’t manually add anything on the users end.
20. Shane 01.02.08 / 2pm

    There is a workaround to deal with the “is” thing. Just use Moodblast to update Twitter, and then use the Twitter sync application in FB to update your FB status. That will take care of the problem until FB gets their act together.
21. Håvard Pedersen 01.02.08 / 3pm

    DRankin mention something about a “is” switch in the API at http://forum.developers.facebook.com/viewtopic.php?id=4543

    And the API docs at http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Users.setStatus indicates that you need to set status_includes_verb to true to avoid the “is”.

    If I’m pointing you to things you already know, I apologize. :)
22. brett 01.02.08 / 3pm

    Are you guys familiar with the extensive support MoodBlast has for dealing with this particular issue? Things like the bracket operators? I’m preparing a screencast (slowly), but for now I’ll just show you this:

    The =[x|y] format will send x to Facebook only, y to everything else. That means that the string

    =[going home.|I’m going home.]

    will not send the “I’m” to Facebook. You can also use -[x] to exclude x from Facebook, and +[x] to send x only to Facebook. You can use any combination in a string:

    -[I’m] going =[away|home.] +[forever.]

    which will send “I’m going home.” to everything but Facebook, but facebook will get “going away forever.” with the “is” in front of it (automatically).

    I know it’s ugly, but it works…

    You can also use ^overrides to quickly send one string to Facebook and then another to everything else. The carat (^) followed by a first letter of a service will override the checkbox selections:

    ^f hanging in an intimidatingly tough manner.

    would send “hanging…” to Facebook only, no matter what was selected in the service checkboxes.

    ^tjs would send to Twitter, Jaiku and Skype. These can go anywhere in the string and will not be sent with the string. You can always check your syntax by using the “Test” feature (command-T) to see what’s actually going to be posted. If there are facebook operators in the string, it will concatenate everything into an =[x|y] in the test panel for easier viewing.

    Make sense?
23. brett 01.02.08 / 3pm

    @Håvard: No apologies necessary, I hadn’t seen that thread. And your comment got moderated before my last one went up (it does that when there are multiple links in the comment), so I didn’t see it right away.

    I’ll probably try to add an option for that in the preferences panel for the next release. Thanks!
24. Håvard Pedersen 01.02.08 / 3pm

    It’s just too much work for my taste. I like to press my shortcut, empty my head in 3 seconds and be done with it. If I need to start thinking about different sentence structures for different services and proper bracket nesting, it actually becomes quicker/easier to do my updates by hand instead of using MoodBlast. :)
25. Floris 01.04.08 / 6pm

    Ok, after using this for a while now: loving it.
    I’ve blogged about it today, so thought I’d let you guys know (includes a video on how I use it on my mac pro) http://mrfloris.com/blogs/using-moodblast/
26. brett 01.04.08 / 6pm

    Thanks for the link! Nice video.

    Did you know you can assign a hotkey combination in the preferences and skip the menubar thing altogether?
27. Randy 01.06.08 / 5am

    Great app. %fuzzy doesn’t seem to be working in 3.0.5… unless I’m doing it wrong :\
28. brett 01.09.08 / 4pm

    I’ll be putting out a new build in the next couple of days, nothing major but I’ll be sure to take a look at %fuzzy… thanks.
29. Eivind Arnstein Johansen 01.13.08 / 5pm

    The only thing I miss from the 2.x-branch of Moodblast is the autocompletion of previous statuses. I can’t see how it makes sense to click the small rectangle to find which shortcut corresponds to which statusmessage. Anyway, thanks for a nice and convenient app! =)
30. Håvard Pedersen 01.22.08 / 12pm

    I’ve been experiencing lockups on shutdown for months, and just today I noticed that the process “MoodBlast” didn’t disappear when I quit MoodBlast from the menutray. Is there anything I can do to help eliminate (or pin down) MoodBlast as the culprit?
31. brett 01.22.08 / 12pm

    I haven’t experienced this, so it’s hard to say. What happens if you load Terminal and type ‘killall MoodBlast’?
32. Håvard Pedersen 01.22.08 / 12pm

    It seems to kill the process. This doesn’t happen all the time, mind you. I’d say about 1 out of 3 shutdowns. And it’s difficult to reproduce on a fresh boot. It seems to happen more often if the Mac has been running for a while.
33. Set Your Online Status for Multiple Apps with MoodBlast [Featured Mac Download] at SoftSaurus 01.22.08 / 10pm

    […] weather, or whatever individual status you feel like setting. MoodBlast is freeware, Mac OS X only. MoodBlast [via […]
34. Eris 01.22.08 / 11pm

    I’d like to see support added for Colloquy.

    Have you considered open source? I guess you’d probably like to keep the option open to make it shareware later on, but I’d like to get my hands dirty in this code. I’ve had a similar idea for some time now and thought for a while about writing a system-wide “presence manager” of sorts. :)
35. MoodBlast- Change Your Online Status On Skype Facebook Twiter and More | Live Crunch 01.23.08 / 12am

    […] MoodBlast software let’s you change your online status on Facebook, Twitter, Skype Jaiku,Tumblr,Adium and iChat. […]
36. Update Multiple Statuses (Statii??) | adam.riggins 01.23.08 / 8am

    […] MoodBlast  […]
37. brett 01.23.08 / 4pm

    @Håvard: I found a related problem that might lead me to a solution for yours. The next release should be out within the next few days, so let me know if it helps.

    @Eris: You’re right about the shareware hopes, but honestly, the primary thing that keeps the source closed is that I learned Obj-C and Cocoa as I wrote this and as a result there’s a lot of cleaning up to do before I’d be comfortable opening the source up. If you want to contact me through the contact form, I’d be happy to share what you need to start playing around.
38. Set Your Online Status for Multiple Apps with MoodBlast [Featured Mac Download] | Satblog.info 01.24.08 / 8pm

    […] weather, or whatever individual status you feel like setting. MoodBlast is freeware, Mac OS X only. MoodBlast [via […]
39. Kevin 02.20.09 / 3am

    I’d love to see the source open on this one too; would very much like seeing identi.ca support… (although it seems like identi.ca should be able to read off my jabber (Adium) status, just haven’t gotten that working yet)
40. Kasper Tikjøb Andersen 06.18.09 / 2am

    Nice app, quite a bit better than my own Applescripts, but I can’t use it without Colloquy support. Open sourcing MoodBlast would indeed be great, so that I could try to add Colloquy support myself.

    Regs, Kasper