Shawn Wilsher » Growl

Growl Extension v1.0.2

Shawn Wilsher — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 06:34:20 +0000

I uploaded the newest version of the add-on earlier today to AMO, so once it gets approved, you’ll get a nice update. The following issues were fixed in this release:

(Thunderbird) Fixed subject encoding issues that sometimes occurred with messages.
(All) Added a de localization.
(Thunderbird) Stopped displaying RSS feeds due to the vast number of notifications that were sent. This is only temporary until a delayed system for dispatching notifications is created that will handle a large load of notifications (Growl will actually handle this in 1.1, so it may not be worthwhile)

Today I just committed a patch to trunk that properly selects the message when you click on a notification in Thunderbird. I’m not going to release that just yet as I want to play with it myself a bit.

Growl Extension v1.0.1 Released!

Shawn Wilsher — Fri, 25 May 2007 05:59:02 +0000

That’s right, I finally got around to releasing the latest version of the Growl Extension for Firefox 2.0 and Thunderbird 2.0. This one has some nice fixes in it:

Cleaned up a memory leak when registering notifications
Enabled Notification support for Chatzilla
Enabled click-back support for Chatzilla notifications (focuses Chatzilla window)
Enabled click-back support for download notifications (opens/focuses the Download Manager)
Enabled click-back support for new mail notifications (opens/focuses Thunderbird)

My testing has shown this to be a rock solid release, and I’m quite proud of it. I have a few more things planned for it, so there still should be a few more releases, but otherwise, there isn’t much more to be done.

You can grab the extension on addons.mozilla.org.

Released

Shawn Wilsher — Wed, 02 May 2007 01:16:46 +0000

The Growl project’s Mozilla extension has officially been released! I dropped Chatzilla support for now since that was the only thing that was holding it up for a stable release. Chatzilla support will come back, but there’s a few bugs I still need to work out. I didn’t see a reason from keeping the other functionality this extension brings from the masses otherwise.

I’ll get on writing docs on how to add your own notifications for Growl on the mac as well. I’ll post here when those are done (hopefully tonight). UPDATE: Developer docs can be found here.

Anywho, you can get it for Thunderbird, Firefox, and Flock right here

Growl Extension v0.9.5

Shawn Wilsher — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 20:18:25 +0000

Well, I recently checked in the fix for the previously mentioned bug. It was a big pain, but I finally figured out and implemented (the implementation was the hard part) the fix. I had a few stupid code errors (like not indicating that my class supports nsIObserver, when it needed to) that caused me to take a lot more time than necessary to get this fixed. Now that that is all done, I’ll be writing up a doc on how to write your own code to hook into this extension so everyone can easily use Growl within Mozilla code!

It should be noted that this version of the extension includes basic support for Chatzilla. I plan on working with Gijs to get more in the future, but I think what we have now is a solid start.

AMO has the latest version, and you can get it from there:
Firefox
Thunderbird

Growl Extension Bug

Shawn Wilsher — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 03:05:29 +0000

Joey Minta brought it to my attention that Growl isn’t saving your preference about a notification being displayed once the application you have the extension running in restarts. Today I looked into it a bit, and at first I thought I was using the wrong method. However, the method that I thought was the right one ended up being an alias for what I was doing anyway (yey for open source code!).

I really don’t want to compare registration dictionaries and then re-register myself, and it seems like I shouldn’t have to. So, I’ve sent a message to the Growl Discussion list wondering if that is actually the intended behavior. The first e-mail I got back seems to indicate that it isn’t the intended behavior, so I’m going to hold off on writing code to compare dictionaries for now. Once this issue is resolved, I will feel confident about releasing 0.9.5, as well as get docs out on how other extension can include support for Growl easily. Hopefully that will be within the next two weeks.

Stalk words and channel messages; Check

Shawn Wilsher — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 19:55:59 +0000

Well, I just checked in the code to have stalk words and your nick send a notification, as well as any message said in the channel. It’s really cool!

I might be able to get all the notifications done by the end of the week, and then I’ll have another preview release out for general consumption (still in the sandbox of course).

You can of course build it from the source if you are ambitious enough. ;)

Chatzilla support with Growl

Shawn Wilsher — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 03:50:01 +0000

I’m working on making Chatzilla work with the Growl extension. The idea was actually brought up by Joey Minta, who pointed out that a lot of other irc clients use Growl. I quickly realized that this would be an awesome feature for the extension and for Chatzilla, so I pinged Gijs Kruitbosch seeing if it would be feasible.

Looks like it will be, so I spent some time today and yesterday getting the component setup for integration. I’m just waiting to hear back from him about how I need to use Chatzilla’s hooks, and away I’ll go!

I’m still looking for feedback, so the more testers the better. I noticed a bug yesterday with Thunderbird new mail notification, and I’m investigating that (my knowledge of mail code is much weaker than that of browser code).

I will keep you all posted!

Growl Extension released!

Shawn Wilsher — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 00:47:42 +0000

Well, today I added support for Thunderbird (2.0b2 and greater) for my Growl integration extension. It also works in Firefox for the downloads. You can get it here, but you need to make the sandbox visible in order to see it (it isn’t a public release yet). You should not click the link to go to the extension since it logs you out of amo (another bug that I don’t know the number of, but will be fixed soon). Copy and paste it, and all should work out.

It only says support for Firefox on that page, but that’s only because of Bug 374890. It really does support Firefox 2.0, Thunderbird 2.0b2, and Flock 0.8!

It will display notifications for download start, download finish, download canceled, download failed, and new mail notifications (depending on which application you install it in). If you have any suggestions, please let me know!

EDIT: There seems to be some possible issues for those using 2.0.0.1 of Firefox. Please make sure you have the latest version!

EDIT2: OK, there seems to be some confusion about the url. Sadly, this is in the sandbox, which means there’s a nice complication. You have to log in/create an account at the site, go to your user preferences, and then enable the sandbox. From there, the url will work just fine – otherwise you’ll get an “Addon not found!” error (see Bug 374406 and friends)

Growl and Firefox

Shawn Wilsher — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 03:18:38 +0000

Well, about an hour ago I checked in some code into the Growl subversion repository for an extension that will get Growl working with Firefox. There is still a minor issue with it, and sadly the issue prevents it from working, but I think that can be solved sooner rather than later.

As of now, the only thing it does is enable the download complete notification to work. You might say “but we’ve already got that!“, but I assure you that my approach is much better. First of all, it doesn’t require that you have growlnotify installed anywhere. It uses the same code that I’m using for Bug 362685, with a few changes for it to work on the 1.8.0 and 1.8 branches (Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 respectively).

I’m starting off small, but it can get much more advanced as things go on. This will, of course, be more useful for extension authors (as consumers) as opposed to browser functionality (the only thing nsIAlertsService is used for is the download complete notification). I can add more notifications down the line though, and I also plan to support at least Thunderbird, and maybe even Sunbird too! I’ll try to keep anyone interested in this updated here.