Doodle Graphics

Update: There's now a "How-To" guide to Doodle Grouper 28/11/2011

Update: I've uploaded a newer version, for more details see: Doodle Grouper 1.0.0.3 Released 05/04/2011

So, with Seemic Desktop 2 hitting Beta this week, I thought I'd just let you all know that I've updated my plugin, Doodle Grouper to work with the current version.

Since the last version, talked about in "Playing with Seesmic Desktop", I've tidied up the interfaces a bit, so they are more in keeping with the main shell theme. This was actually a fairly simple process, as simple as binding the style of the ChildWindow declaration to the main theme:

<controls:ChildWindow x:Class="DoodleGrouper.View.TempModifyGroupWindow" [...]

                      Style="{StaticResource CustomMessageBox}">

And that's it, pretty much, nice, grey dialogs, with pretty buttons on them. The only other thing I had to do was ensure that the Foreground colours of my text blocks were white so that they showed up:

So to sum up the changes:

• The plugin now inherits the theme from the parent shell.
• Groups can be renamed.
• You can now add and remove users from a group - simple click on the Settings icon for a group, select the users you want to remove from the group, and press "Update", no additional tweets will be shown in that group, and next time you open Seesmic Desktop all their updates will be gone.
• You can add users to the group at any time, no need to wait for them to post - just add them in, and the next time they post they'll appear - ideal for those infrequent posters that you really want to flag up.

Next on my list to consider is a way to enable popup toast on a per-group basis.

This plugin has two main advantages over the "user lists" feature in Seemic:

1. It's not tied to just Twitter accounts - you can add Facebook and Google Buzz users in there too, in fact any account that shows posts on the "home" timeline should appear in the group timeline.
2. It will auto-update - Twitter lists don't (didn't? I've not tried them much recently) update automatically, because each one needs to be requested individually, and this will eat into your api usage quite quickly. As these are updated as posts arrive, they don't use up that precious resource.

If you want to get your hands dirty:

• The source - you'll need to update the references to the Seesmic.Sdp.* libraries.
• Doodle Grouper (a repeat of the link to the compiled plug-in from above)

As always, let me know how you get on with it.

Filed under: Plug-ins, Seesmic, Silverlight