0.0.14 (released 2008-07-01)

Can now extract URL clues from the foreground tab of Camino and Opera. Tested only on the latest release versions (Camino 1.6.1 and Opera 9.5).

Traditionally, the Shelf window hides itself if it has no context to display. Exposed this as an option, defaulting to true, for people who don’t want their windows vanishing on them.

The Dopplr module now displays the time in the person’s location properly according to your system timezone, rather than the GMT time where they are.

last.fm changed their XML order? Anyway, I now explicitly order the tracks in the client, most recent at the top.

Fixed a crashing bug if there were urls in your address book cards that didn’t begin ‘http://’.

Fixed a bug with unicode domain names. I suspect they’re still broken for matching purposes, but they no longer crash the app, so that’s an improvement.

Extract the HTML view template into an external file. Include jQuery, so I can start on the superfluous visual effects. Do almost all UI update work using JQuery-based javascript from the HTML template, rather than re-sending all the content every refresh.

Fixed various other UTF-8-related crashers.

There’s an annoying off-by-one-hour bug somewhere in the feedprovider, something to do with time zones. I’ll get it eventually. Sorry.

0.0.13 (released 2008-03-28)

All blocks are now sorted by date, rather than just Feed blocks. This means that if a contact has blogged something more recently than they’ve twittered something, the blog block will be above the twitter block.

The Dopplr provider is back and working again. It now properly uses the Dopplr auth-bounce code to get itself a token from Dopplr, so should actually be usable by people other than me.

Lots of trivial little encoding fixes and catches for annoying ‘other apps suck’ failure cases.

RSS feed items without titles no longer break the Feed provider.

If you live in a non-GMT timezone, dates now work. Hurrah for going to conferences and having to suffer under my own bugs.

Shelf 0.0.12 (Released 2008-02-14)

Shelf now has a preference to only poll for context and display the window if a global shortcut key is pressed (currently, this is hard-coded to Command-Ctrl-J). Turning this on will stop Shelf from polling, it’ll manually display the window when you press the hotkey. BUG - turning this preference off will require a restart of Shelf before the polling starts again. And yes, I’ll make the key configurable soon.

Feed entries now display about how long ago they were, rather than absolute times. Do we like this? Maybe this should be a preference.

Messed with the flickr photo display style to include titles, and have smaller thumbnails. I think I prefer this way.

Special casing for last.fm urls is now in, so you’ll see your contact’s recently-played tracks and coverart, if available.

Special-casing for the few pages I know of that have totally broken RSS feeds to supress them from the feedlists.

Feeds in the display are now ordered with the most recently updated feed at the top of the list. ‘Special’ feeds (twitter, flickr, lastfm) are still ordered above all others. I’ll change this soon.

We now correctly strip CSS styling from feed contents.

The file cache now cleans itself up. The first run of the app may take a while… Sorry.

The feedprovider de-dupes its blocks based on the feed url, rather than the page url. No more repeated flickr photos blocks because they have more than one different url to their photos.

If there are rel=”me” links in the current page, and you’re using Safari, I can use them directly to resolve context rather than relying on google to have spidered the page.

Blocks that have come from the Google Social Graph or have otherwise been guessed now have a little ‘G’ in their title bar. Ugly, but I want a way of distinguishing them a little.

Shelf now sends a proper User-Agent to remote servers when fetching feeds.

Documented large chunks of the source much better.

Removed the xmltramp library, using simplejson to parse the Dopplr API files instead. Not that the Dopplr module works. But if it did, I would.

Shelf 0.0.11 (released 2008-02-06)

Feed provider now displays the first 10 words of the blog entry under the heading, and the entry date.

Add ‘birthday’ to the list of simple information displayed about a user.

I now use the Google Social Graph to try to derive a person from a page you’re looking at, if that page isn’t already in your address book. Likewise, I use the Google Social Graph to find out more urls from someone once I have one URL for them. So if your homepage links to your flickr page, and only your homepage is in my address book, I’ll still see your flickr photos when I visit your home page, and I’ll see you if I visit your flickr page. Magic.

The Google Social stuff is off by default - there are two preferences for turning it on. This is because it’s a privacy nightmare - it sends every URL you visit, and every URL belonging to anyone you IM with, to Google.

There are now some trivial preferences for how you want Shelf to display - the old default behaviours of ‘always come to the foreground when I have something to tell you’ and ‘window is always on top if there is context’ are now options.

Known bugs

The Dopplr module is currently broken, due to the odd SSL certificate Dopplr use. Sorry. Working on it.

The RSS feed fetcher shares a cookie store with Safari. This may or may not be a bug or a feature, depending on your point of view. Anyone care?

Technical changes:

Converted build process to use py2app rather than xcode, because I know how to make py2app dance to my tunes. Specifically, I know how to make it pull in external libraries and bundle them properly. Reorganised source files into folders so I can keep track of where things are.

Huge great internal re-write. Many more code-paths are now much more message-passing based, and can do things in the background. The Google Social stuff uses this, so no longer blocks the foreground thread.