Wed 14 May 2008
Snackr is everywhere!
Posted by Narciso Jaramillo under AIR | design | development | Flex | Snackr14 Comments
Wow–nearly 600 people have downloaded Snackr in the last two days! Thanks to everyone who’s sent mail or posted comments; it’s great to know people like it. The most common requests so far seem to be:
- Allow multiple selection in the feed list, so you can delete a bunch of feeds at once. It seems like a lot of people imported large feed lists from their existing blog readers, then realized they didn’t want to actually see all of those feeds in Snackr.
- Support Asian language characters. Currently, Snackr uses Myriad Web, and the font is embedded in order to make fade animations work properly for text, but that font only has Latin characters. I’ll either need to add an option to use the system font (and turn off fade animations), or maybe build a version that embeds a font with Asian characters in it (though that would probably lead to a huge installer).
- Ability to keep a list of items to read later (e.g. by starring them). I’ve been wanting this for awhile but haven’t gotten around to implementing it yet–now I have some incentive!
- Posting the source. I do really want to do this, but I need to set aside some time to make the code slightly less embarrassing 🙂
I also noticed today as I was using it on my machine that for some short posts, the popup seems to “bobble around” a bit and end up at a very thin size (it’s different from the jittery animation on Vista/Linux; this is happening even on OS X). It’s intermittent, but it reproduces pretty regularly on certain kinds of posts. Has anybody else seen this? I’ll have to look into it–it must be a recent injection, as I never noticed it before.
I’m planning to make regular updates to Snackr, though things are pretty busy; I’m hoping I can carve out enough time to release a new version in a couple of weeks. Snackr should automatically notify you when an update is available.
Keep those cards and letters coming!
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this thing is really really cool 🙂
I’ve just downloaded it, it’s a very impressive AIR app! Well done, perfect transitions and a very useful double screen support. Perfect use for AIR technology atm.
Thanx for Snackr man!
Christian Cantrell posted a solution to fading text without embeding fonts:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/cantrell/archives/2007/10/make_text_fade.html
Uncle nj, my wish is to have an option to control Snackr’s transparency on Windows (more specifically, i’d like to make it more transparent). And a pony.
@Danny: Ah, I hadn’t thought of using bitmap caching (or filters, which have the same effect). I’ll definitely have to try that out.
@rone: Finally, an easy feature request! I should be able to sneak that in soon.
Support of cyrillics – plz plz 🙂
and tray icon 🙂
Thanks for releasing such a cool product for people to play with.
This thing is great! I’ve been trying to learn Flex myself and was playing around with the concept of a stock ticker widget. I’d love to see the source when you feel comfortable about it… I think this is a great example of what AIR can do. What’s the ticker itself? A modified Tile List? I like the chrome as well.
I’m running it on Ubuntu Linux. Screenshot http://www.flickr.com/photos/macewan/2498356258/
Love the app. Was wondering how many times is an item displayed from the feed? Does it reappear if you’ve clicked and read it? It shouldn’t.
@Chris: The ticker is actually just a custom component; I manually create a child container and scroll it around.
@Patrix: Items do keep showing up again if you don’t read them, but once you’ve read an item it shouldn’t show up again. However, there’s a bug right now where the same item can show up multiple times in rapid succession (this happens if you have a feed with only one or two items in it)–the next version should mostly fix that.
Yeah, I saw the thin post thing as well, but i must tell you. This little feed reader rocks!!
if it sync’d with google reader I’d be in internet heaven right now! lol
Thanks for such a wonderful little app!
Keep up the good work!
please have it somehow sync with netvibes.com if at all possible since many people use that platform and it rocks.
if not then what i plan to do is migrate my ‘maybe to read’ feeds to the ticker and leave my ‘must read’ feeds on netvibes to be sure i get to them once in a while but i am surprised that this does not seem to exist on the mac before (or i have not found it).
i’ve even posted about snackr here: http://www.carrotchutney.com
keep us posted on how this develops