OBSOLETE - soapi-notify : Stay ahead of the pack with new question notification V1 release

Question

Obsolete:

This app no longer works. It uses a version of the API that was decommissioned in May of 2014.

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soapi-notify

Stay ahead of the pack

soapi-notify is an easy to use windows application that monitors Stack Exchange sites for new questions.

Watch a 5 minute end-to-end quickstart video

You may filter the questions that are notified by tag. You may choose to see only questions that contain a tag or to see only questions that do not contain a tag.

soapi-notify may be minimized to the notification tray area by pressing the space bar.

You may optionally receive notification via Growl for Windows. soapi-notify carries it's own custom Growl displays that provide a detailed view of questions in a familiar format.

The soapi-notify displays also provide 2 unique capabilities:

• Selective pinning: If you would like to keep a question on-screen, simply click the grey lock icon. It will turn gold and the notification will remain on screen while others time out and fade away.
• Updating: A pinned question notification will be updated at regular intervals to reflect the current state of the question.

soapi-notify requires no installation.

Simply place the file in a convenient location and run it from the command line or create a shortcut.

To view command line usage, execute soapi-notify -?

To use the GUI configurator simply execute soapi-notify

NOTE:

The inspiration for soapi-info came directly from the perl script SENotify by radius. If you like this app, please also give SENotify an upvote.

Usage:

Watch a 5 minute end-to-end quickstart video

You may simply run soapi-notify to invoke the GUI configuration or directly from the command line or from a batch file or windows shortcut.

Switches:

      --sites, -s=VALUE       Sites to monitor, semi-colon delimited. 
                              possible values: 
                              serverfault;stackoverflow;superuser;meta.stackoverflow;stackapps

      --tags, -t=VALUE        If specified, only questions containing these tags will be notified. 
                              semi-colon delimited. example: c#;sqlite

      --exclude, -x           Exclude questions containing tags specified in tags|t

      --poll, -p=VALUE        Polling interval in seconds, default to 60 seconds. Minimum value is 60.

      --growl, -g             Enable growl notification (need growl for windows)

      --update, -u            Update pinned questions. 
                              Note: this option requires Growl For Windows and the use of one of the 
                              soapi-notify displays.

      --help, -h, -?         Show usage.

Configurator

The configurator can be used to run soapi-notify or as a command-line builder by copying the command line text.

Growl Operation:

• To open the question in the default browser, left click the notification.
• To close a notification, right-click the notification
• Alt-X to close the oldest notification
• Alt-Shift-X to close all open notifications

Growl Configuration:

To take advantage of the pin-able and update-able displays you must open growl to the 'application' tab.

License

soapi-info is released under the MIT/X11 open source license.

Download

http://soapinotify.codeplex.com/

Requirements

• Windows XP/Vista/7 etc etc (tested on XP and 7. Confirmation of other platforms appreciated)
• .Net framework 3.5
• Growl notification requires installation of Growl for Windows

Possible future release for Mono

Contact

Sky @ http://soapinotify.codeplex.com/

Code

soapi-notify was written in C# in Visual Studio 2008.

Version: 1.1.0.1 - changed api version from 0.9 to 1.0

Version: 1.0.9.1

• changed api version from 0.8 to 0.9

Version: 1.0

• incorporated custom pin-able and update-able growl displays
• economized api calls
• embedded custom display deployment resulting in a single file deployment
• added gui 'configurator'

Version: 0.1.3

• moved to .net 3.5 to eliminate JSON.net dependency
• incorporated ILMerge into build process to merge the Growl assemblies to produce a single executable file
• fixed phantom tray icon issues
• fixed odd issue with capturing keys. now single press of spacebar will minimize the app.

Version: 0.1.2

• removed default sticky (this can be configured in growl)
• added link to question. Click notification to open question. Right-Click notification to close.

Version: 0.1.1

• fixed timezone issues
• added minimize to tray. press space twice to minimize.

Credits

• Original Idea: SENotify
• Stack Exchange Icons

Coming Soon:

• the ability to monitor existing questions
• extended filtering support
• @you notifications
• proxy support

These will be incorporated gradually over the next month or so. I need to finish some other projects and get a job. Anyone who wants to help out may submit patches and perhaps be added to the team.

_{Total Cost: 18 developer hours over 3 days}

Answer 1

Design Conversation:

_{in reverse chronological order.}

part the Third: in which code poet waxes v1.

After the unexpected divine intervention of Brian, the developer of Growl for Windows, I was able to refactor the evolving custom pin-able update-able displays into much slimmer and much less complex code. The updates are now batched by the server, soapi-notify, and pushed to the notifications that are still registered for updates.

Thanks Brian.

For those that are not quite satisfied with the default displays provided with soapi-notify, the source for the default display is a great place to start writing your own. Be sure to share it here.

There are a few more things that I would like to incorporate into V1 before calling it soup.

• the ability to monitor existing questions. keep an eye on questions as they evolve.
• extended filtering support. either/or tags using the api methods is a bit limiting. I will use client side filtering to provide a more compelling filter experience.
• proxy support - need to set up a proxy to test this.

These will be incorporated gradually over the next month or so. I need to finish some other projects and get a job. Anyone who wants to help out may submit patches and perhaps be added to the team.

Let me know what you think

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part the Second: in which code poet introduces vNext.

So, after considering radius' comments I realize that the omission of the vote/answer/view metric was a bad idea, so I redesigned the new notification and console output.

With new custom display:

With plain growl display:

Regarding the other half of the dialog in which the possibility of updating notifications has been realized in the self-updating notifications.

If a notification times out and closes it self, there is no update.

If the notification is 'sticky', either by configuration via Growl or from 'pinning' by clicking the grey lock icon, the notification refreshes itself at as yet to be determined refresh rate.

Compare the 'How to validate HTML Matches W3C standards' question in the screen shot: The console output shows the state of the question when it was pulled and the notification has tracked, in real-time, the votes, views and answers over the last 4 minutes.

This build is in the source repository right now. If you are familiar or would like to make yourself familiar with the process of manually adding a growl notification type, knock yourself out.

A binary release including self-installation of the display will be released tonight.

Coming Up:

By popular demand: A GUI.

The GUI will provide extended functionality:

• more control over and more convenient specification of which tags to include/exclude/pin
• • select and copy your 'ignored tags' from the site and paste them into a text box to omit questions containing those posts from being notified.
• • select and copy your 'interesting tags' from the site and paste them into a text box to make questions containing those tags 'sticky' by default along with the appropriate background color visual cue.

Let me know what you think.

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part The First: in which code poet mixes good idea with short sightedness

I whipped up soapi-notify in a few hours. It actually took more time to publish and document than it did to write.

After using it for a day I am convinced that the idea is much more than a novelty.

I am polling at the recommended 60 second intervals and, funnily enough, I never see a question that is more than a minute old. imagine that. And it brings the point home when I see a stack of questions that are less than 10 seconds old.

So, I am convinced that this is a viable app. With that in mind, lets discuss some design issues.

Vote, Answer and View counts:

It is quite obvious that my soon to be previous screenshots include these metrics in the results and they seemed relevant in that there was non-null data. But this was due to a bug in the time-zone conversion.

In reality - as explained previously, the questions that are being reported are seconds old. There are no votes and there are no answers. So I have removed those data points, which makes the output much cleaner.

Date Output

For the console output, which is persistent and linear, I am including a short time string.
e.g. 12:02:20 PM

For transient notification such as Growl, I am verbalizing the time difference much in the same way you see on the sites. e.g. 19s ago

Our very own Growl Display

So, not content with the default behaviour of any of the displays (growl notification boxes) that are available in that I would like to let them fade out as normal but i would also like the ability to 'pin' or make 'sticky' a notification. Kinda like a sticky note.

So I created a custom display just for us. Here is the design at full resolution.

I am building it so that all notifications are static height, unlike standard Growl displays, to present a more consistent display. They are just a little wider than most displays I have seen, around 400 pixels. If this turns out to be an issue with screen real estate we can revisit this and re-institute a more narrow dynamic height notification.

Let me know what you think.

Answer 2

Is there a way to get this to work with other SE sites, e.g. Programmers.SE?

Answer 3

I've just downloaded the app, entered this for the tags:

meteor JavaScript

And got the following error:

soapi-notify: There was an error retrieving results.
The remote server returned an error: (400) Bad Request.


Press CTRL-C to exit.

Another issue: if I lose network connectivity and a poll happens, the app will break, and won't reconnect.

If the app is minimized when any error occurs, you won't know about it, because it doesn't send a Growl notification.

Sky, you around? Might you make these quick fixes?

Answer 4

I tried it out on Windows 7 running the latest version of Growl for Windows, and I had no problems:

My only request - please make a GUI!

GUI Mockup

Rather than trying to describe what I would want in a GUI, I'll show you:

The main settings page - you could also add options like "Start soapi with Windows", etc. Ideally, soapi would start minimized as an icon in the system tray. You can also specify the refresh time, force a check, and add/remove sites to check.

Site-specific page - you can add tags on the left to only have soapi retrieve/display questions with those tags, and on the right, you can add tags to be ignored, even if they occur with a favorited tag on the left.

Answer 5

It looks like the version is broken with (possibly) the current version of the SO API. I understand the code is rather old, so that may or may not be the cause of this. When run on Windows 7, it throws, regardless the options I tried, the following error:

D:\Temp>soapi-notify.exe -s StackOverflow
soapi-notify: There was an error retrieving results.
Invalid JSON primitive: .

Press CTRL-C to exit.