Post by masternes on Feb 19, 2010 6:50:05 GMT 1
To start with, let me say that you've done a great job with Spiffy. I've tried a number of different Gmail notifiers, and this is the best. After playing around with it, I have a few suggestions:
- Have an option to "rotate" new emails rather than stack them, as in Gmail notifier and Google Talk notifier. When I have lots of emails, it takes up lots of screen space and can quickly go beyond the top of the screen (especially on a netbook). A bonus would also be to provide left/right arrows on the messages to allow manual scrolling between emails, like in the Google Talk notifier.
- Right now, Tell Me Again only shows the last email received. In my opinion, it'd be more useful to show all all unread emails. If I missed one when the notifier came up but got another email after that one, there's no way to see it again without restarting Spiffy (as far as I can tell).
- Have the option to separate user settings from the application folder. While it may be simpler and more portable to create the settings file with the application, this means that other users will get my notifications if they try to use Spiffy, and there's no way for them to create their own settings without interfering with mine. I suppose the workaround for this can simply for each user to have a copy of Spiffy in each profile, but it would be cool to throw the Spiffy executable into Program Files and then just have it read from the AppData for each user.
- Trying a number of wav files (e.g., if you're using Windows 7, try any notify.wav located in c:\Windows\Media\*\) causes spiffy to throw an exception because of the wav format. The exact error is "Sound API only supports playing PCM wave files." Outside of using a different library to handle media files, there may not be much you can do as this is probably a limitation of .NET, but I'd suggest handling it a bit more user-friendly (perhaps immediately recognizing incompatible wavs and preventing them from being applied?)
Again, great job so far!
Brian
- Have an option to "rotate" new emails rather than stack them, as in Gmail notifier and Google Talk notifier. When I have lots of emails, it takes up lots of screen space and can quickly go beyond the top of the screen (especially on a netbook). A bonus would also be to provide left/right arrows on the messages to allow manual scrolling between emails, like in the Google Talk notifier.
- Right now, Tell Me Again only shows the last email received. In my opinion, it'd be more useful to show all all unread emails. If I missed one when the notifier came up but got another email after that one, there's no way to see it again without restarting Spiffy (as far as I can tell).
- Have the option to separate user settings from the application folder. While it may be simpler and more portable to create the settings file with the application, this means that other users will get my notifications if they try to use Spiffy, and there's no way for them to create their own settings without interfering with mine. I suppose the workaround for this can simply for each user to have a copy of Spiffy in each profile, but it would be cool to throw the Spiffy executable into Program Files and then just have it read from the AppData for each user.
- Trying a number of wav files (e.g., if you're using Windows 7, try any notify.wav located in c:\Windows\Media\*\) causes spiffy to throw an exception because of the wav format. The exact error is "Sound API only supports playing PCM wave files." Outside of using a different library to handle media files, there may not be much you can do as this is probably a limitation of .NET, but I'd suggest handling it a bit more user-friendly (perhaps immediately recognizing incompatible wavs and preventing them from being applied?)
Again, great job so far!
Brian