##Design Conversation:
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
alt text http://img710.imageshack.us/img710/2950/soapinotifyv02screensho.png
###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.
alt text http://img443.imageshack.us/img443/3633/soapinotifydisplay.png
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.