And this is also what all upcoming 1.4.x releases will be – if you find more bugs (I don’t hope so but am realistic…) they will be fixed – and no or only features will be added so we are now in something like a “Snow Nymphicus” phase here

In parallel I do extend my work on the 2.0 line which will be – as promised – all about design. Many of you like all the  features Nymphicus has but the current design – what shall I say… Those following @liGhun might have seen already some first screenshots and mockups and this will be the place where you see it first.

That said here the changelog of Nymphicus 1.4.3

• Better scroll behaviour: if new items are received the current topmost shown item will never been scrolled out of sight (it will go some steps down but not out of sight anymore).
  this also means the scrolled to Tweet Marker position now stays visible
• Read It Later renamed to Pocket
• All settings are now saved every 90 seconds to be sure changes won’t be lost when Nymphicus crashes
• All settings are now saved if the preferences window is closed regardless if done via Save button or by the window close button
• Fix: Accounts are now saved more often to make sure they are available on next restart in all possible cases
• Fix: Possible crash on new Twitter item retrieval
• Fix: Missing Snarl notifications classes on first start
• Fix: Possible crash on long running instances (as well es edited/delete tweet) related to the maximum number of concurrent displayed items
• Fix: Crashes on tweet sending will now be catched. If you encounter an error message please send it to me for further investigation
• Fix: Notification of new likes on empty text Facebook items now shown correctly
• Fix: New items icon badge & window title now more reliable
• Fix: If some invalid data is send through streaming interface Nymphicus does not crash anymore
• Fix: Clicking the retweet button in an UserInfo window recent item crashed (you wouldn’t believe how much code needed to be changed for that fix )
• Fix: In some rares cases a tweet was shown as being retweeted where it wasn’t and displayed some random text
• FIx: Stability in many places

I have just uploaded Winslew 1.8.1 to the webserver and your auto update will show you this version too. It’s a very small update – it exchanges “Read It Later” everywhere (I hope I found all ) with the new branding “Pocket”. This is only cosmetic – also 1.8.0 still runs fine as the old API endpoints stay still valid. There will be a 1.8.2 lateron when Pocket moved the API endpoints officially – but this will be another news

This minor release mostly covers some bugs which might cause crashes but also includes some current user wishes:

• Scrolling to Tweet Marker position when just leaving the window (and not changing the View) removed
• Tooltip of username in a tweet item box now shows username and fullname
• Main window and icon (only Vista and above) now show the new items count if window is not in focus / activated
• Link to docmentation in first start wizrd now visible
• Fix: Saving proxy settings in First Start Wizard was not reliable
• Fix: Searches and list results have not always been filtered as expected on initial startup fetch
• Fix: Possible crash when tweet is deleted

The new items display looks like this:

(and if you read the tweets in the screenshot: yes, I do love the design of MetroTwit )

But it doesn’t stop here – just when I was about to go over to my work on Nymphicus 2.0 one of my favorite new social services called QUOTE.fm announced that they are going to release an API. Of course I immediately started to create a .NET client to QUOTE.fm (and released it as Open Source) and integrated it fully into Nymphicus with all its advantages like Views, filters and so on. QUOTE.fm is all about quoting articles in the web – just head over to there website and get an account now. As you might know me I created a short video (OK, it’s more than four minutes) to show all the integration of QUOTE.fm into Nymphicus.

Great new stuff, isn’t it? And we have even more.

First I have to say we missed a feature of Twitter more or less completely (since we used it differently than many other users): The favorites had been second class citizens. From now on they are first class citizens which means they are fetched seperately (meaning you get many from the past), can be selected in Views and do have an own filter quick filter button.

Second I extended Facebook in an important way: Now all comments are fetched on first retrieval which brings us to the point that Nymphicus knows if you liked or commented an entry yourself or not. And this is very important as you now can tune your Snarl settings to handle them different (e. g. just don’t show them if you didn’t like or comment the status).

Finally a small (one line of code!) but important change: the limitation to have only two streaming Twitter accounts is gone. And because of this we need much less API calls (which are rate limited) and so the update interval goes down from four minutes to 90 seconds.

The short version: it’s about design.

First of all my current plans include to get rid of most of the many buttons we now have (and thanks to your feedback already know where it will be going). Back when Nymphicus “only” used to be a Twitter client the buttons made sense and were not that many. But with extending to Facebook and Google Reader (and maybe more in the future…) the buttons flooded the interface.

Second is composing messages. A quite often wish has been to include the compose textbox directly into the window instead of opening a new small one – so composing is now be planned to be on bottom of the main window.

Third is multi column view. It took quite some time till some of you finally convinced me that Nymphicus should have the option(!) that more than one View should be shown at once. This is – as seen from the coding – a small step but it’ll change dramtically who might be happy with Nymphicus (as it’ll be optional it’s about more happy users.

Fourth is the final completion of the longterm wish about integrating Tweet Marker. In this case all the API calling stuff is already in Nymphicus since many months but it has not been easy to bring the Views concept together with traditional approach of Tweet Marker (one column per type). I have now the concepts but it will be quite some coding till it’ll work. But maybe (depending on my free time the next weeks – all this stuff here is my hobby next to my fulltime job…) I might put an intermediate 1.4 with “only” this feature. But this is no promise…!

Fifth is something I am not sure right now. The downside is the number of known installations and the number of received license purchases – well – differs a little bit to much in my opinion so I think about adding payment reminders within the Views (something like every 50th entry or so). This is something I would like to avoid but in the end it looks like…

Finally a personal note: thank you guys for using & feedback – I really appreciate every feedback!

So here ist what’s new in 1.8:

• Local caching can be disabled now
  When disable more and less versions are always fresh generated on access
• Complete rewrite of the communication with Read It Later API – it’s now based on Json.NET (http://json.codeplex.com/)
  You won’t see it but it brings a faster code, fixes some rare crashes and finally is much better code
• Workaound: if your Windows username contains special characters the offline cached version can not be displayed (bug in WebKit) – the workaround gets them online now on every access
  I still hope that WebKit will be fixed for that – the bug is known already and I am not the only reporter
• If a crash occurs (and I hope it doesn’t!) you get now a complete error message which you can send to me for fixing
  So not only the “stopped working” window but an (to be honest ugly) window with the infos

As of today in 2012 three of our projects are completed and got already got some enhancing dot-releases. Also with Nymphicus for Windows a friend of mine joined lI’ Ghun.

So it has been quite clear that the homepage needed a complete rewrite – starting from the plattform (which has been Mac desktop application only available on my own Mac), the complete structure as the products now all get there own homepages and domains and maybe most important: the design. I am very happy having finally found a decent theme (which did cost some money but I really think its worth it) and running on a modern plattform.

Let me know if you like the new homepage (and also if not…)

While working on the next major update of Nymphicus for Windows with its than to be reorganized user interface I decided to release an intermediate release with some smaller enhancements.

First we have now a “mark as read” feature available so you can see what you already made (which will be even greater later on when Tweet Marker will be activated).

Second is the enhanced conversation view. The old one was great but no one did find the buttons to activate it. Additionally you can now also see conversation which have not been your own.

Finally the user icons in Twitter are now cached to your local hard disk and because of this Nymphicus is even faster than it has been already.

As always I created a short video to show you the new functions on actions:

• new account type: Google Reader
  Integrate your RSS news stream directly into your Tweets and Facebook messages
• Facebook display reworked
  Facebook items are now much nicer displayed and features all the stuff which has been hidden until now
• Keyboard shortcuts
  Do mostly everything important without even touching your mouse

Additionally I spent really much time on stability (which became an issue with my up to ten accounts I use personally) and next to that on performance. It’s even faster than it has been before.

Also I used the great service unshort.me to unshorten all links in tweets. But this service has been discontinued recently and so I reenabled my “old” code doing it on my own and we are up and running again – and that also much(!) faster.

The next release I am already working on will be mainly about interface refinements – I have had some great feedback with awesome ideas on how to reorganize the interface which has been quite cluttered with all the new account buttons added recently.

Finally I have to say I had a serious server crash last week here on my dedicated server (for the pros: I ended up needing to start over with fresh kernel & Grub configuration) and there might be some issues left. So if you encounter anything not looking right here on the webpage let me know…

The keyboard shortcuts:

o Main window
Ctrl + t – open compose new tweet window
Ctrl + n – open compose new Facebook status window
Ctrl + s – open Twitter search window
Ctrl + r – Refresh all accoounts
Ctrl + f – select the filter textbox
Ctrl + o – select the view combobox

o Compose new tweet window
Ctrl + s – shorten all links
Ctrl + i – add an image
Ctrl + o – select the account combobox
Escape – close window
Ctrl + enter in textbox sends the tweet

o Compose new Facebook status window
Ctrl + t – select message textbox
Ctrl + l – select link textbox
Ctrl + o – select the account combobox
Escape – close window
Ctrl + enter in textbox sends the message

Of course Google+ would be my first choice but Google still has no real API to access it – I really can’t see what they are thinking about how to become a competitor of Twitter and Facebook if they miss such an important feature. And as far as I can say the Google+ usage is already decreasing 

So I picked up a user request and decided to add something completely different for a combination unseen on the market right now. I do now add Google Reader directly into Nymphicus (including the complete Views-concept and so on). The great thing that my first own bigger desktop app I ever did is my open source client to Google Reader so I have the integration done already for simple retrieval of unread items. I plan right now to make a small release quite soon with this simple solution and then go a step forward.

This step will mean I already invested now quite some hours into my next (and planned since many years…) project which will be called Meneré. Meneré will be a feature complete Google Reader client with a complete new underlying library for communicating with Google Reader.

In general you can top wishes about services, social networks and so on now you want to have been added. LinkedIn will be sure one of the next too…