We've had a LOT of great feeback come in regarding Gadfly the past few weeks, thanks to everybody that's made an effort to tell us what they love, hate and want to see in the future. I thought it was only fair to publish a list of upcoming items, both to whet your whistle and to commit me to getting them done in the very near future. Does anybody say "whet your whistle" anymore?
Upcoming Features:
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Short URL preview control: This is going to be above and beyond any of the basic URL un-shortening previewers around today. We see this as a dynamic user control that pops the full, original url, some sort of page preview or screenshot of the destination, site metadata, and maybe even some video. Ever been stung by people shortening malicious links? With Gadfly, those days will be over. I can't wait to get this control in place.
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Threaded Conversations/In-Reply-To Tracking: This is a must-have that's been requested by multiple users... we'll be adding support for tracking a conversation by displaying a chain of tweets that have been involved in a "reply-to" thread, aka a Twitter conversation.
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Drag and Drop Groups: A lot of requests for this one.
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Trending Topics: I'll come clean: I didn't think people used these as much as they do. They'll be in place soon.
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Enhanced Geolocation Functionality: We have some ideas to make this more clean, more accurate and more fun. Also there may be some upcoming changes to the Twitter API that will enable Gadfly to do more with the raw geolocation data we currently generate.
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Out of Browser Authentication: Gadfly already supports multiple Twitter accounts. These are fully functional in the web browser... but currently in the installed OOB version you can only access accounts you registered with Gadfly from the browser (so you can't add new accounts directly in OOB). Looking for ways around this, but tough without the HTML Bridge available. I do have a method that works (click a tweet link in OOB)... so maybe this is possible.
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Skinnable Gadfly. We've tossed around the idea of making Gadfly skinnable. A few requests for this and a very cool way to make it "yours" and show off some design skills. I'd love to host a Gadfly Skin library at some point. Creating a Zune-like skin would be one of our first attempts at this. GadZune. Flypaper. If you name it they will come.
Upcoming Bug Fixes:
And remember: we're still listening and will be pushing a build soon, so keep feedback coming via comments or on Twitter @steveholstad or @gadflyclient
http://gadfly.claritycon.com
We recently released Gadfly, our Silverlight Twitter client, to public beta. This project stems from my old Twitterlight days, and thanks to a few kind souls here at Clarity, the project gained momentum and has become a very well received Silverlight offering. Gadfly has already become the everyday Twitter client for some, thanks to the feature list below and support for Silverlight Out-of-Browser (OOB), which is part of Silverlight 3. OOB applications are one-click installations onto a client system, and behave much as a desktop application would without the need for a separate framework installation, such as AIR. Another nice feature of OOB apps is the ability to deliver both web and desktop experiences to users while maintaining a single code base. And we're talking cross-browser, cross-platform for these, too. OOB apps live in the browser sandbox for obvious security reasons, but I think that even with its current limitations out of browser will have a huge impact on RIA developers starting immediately and expanding more and more as the feature list grows.
To be sure, we're still gathering feedback from users, planning additions and adding polish, but the current release is pretty solid and has a ton of features. We have even more additions in mind, check the next post for a few of the ideas we've started/brainstormed. I won't rehash all of the features of Gadfly, as http://gadfly.claritycon.com has been launched with a cool-factor I could never achieve. It's also the place for you to launch Gadfly and give it a go.
A quick overview of some of my favorite features:
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Virtualizing Stack Panels. Lee Roth did the work on this custom control that produces
significant performance gains and memory reduction by virtualizing the list of items bound to the panel, and recycling the Tweet controls to eliminate the need for newing up one control for each item in the list. Currently we store up to 300 friend tweets in isolated storage, without virtualization you'd see noticable lag while they are loaded, created and databound. I don't have a screenshot because it's a bit of an abstract concept, but just take a moment the appreciate the virtualization awesomeness in your head.....mmmmmmm....cool. Seriously this was a ton of work and Lee's been knee deep in virtualization lately. Check out
his write-up.
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Slick design. Erik Klimczak put together the look and feel of the app, which I think really shows off some of what the Clarity Design Team can do in a very short period of time. Lots of detail and nuance in here.. you'll have to discover on your own what the app does when Twitter is down or when you near the Twitter API limit. Hmm, apps can have a sense of humor now?
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Multiple custom group types. Notice the left hand bar? That contains any search groups you've added, any users you've singled out, and custom groups of users you created, a few "system" groups most Twitter users love (DMs, Mentions, Public, etc), a customizable geolocating Nearby group, and Gadfly Picks, which we'll discuss below. You can have as many of these groups active as you like, and they will resize to fit the current screen area. Horizontal scrolling is available for the rest, as well as the ability to click the group name to scroll the group back into view.
- Fleep-A-Tweet. Yeah I just made that up. But you CAN click on the tweeter's profile pic and the tweet will flip to view more detail about that person. Still not satisfied? Then click the expander and see that user's recent timeline, or add/drop the person as a friend. And c'mon, you KNOW "fleep a tweet" is fun to say. It's kinda Chef Boyardee. Yeah I said it.
- Manage your custom groups. Pretty self explanatory.
- The Nearby group and geolocating tweets. THE Kevin Marshall's contribution to Gadfly: If you open the "Nearby" system group, Gadfly will try to determine your current location. If your location is found, you'll see all tweets by users located within 20 miles of the specified location. If you want to set the location manually, click the current location and enter a city, zip, landmark, etc and we'll try to map it to a geolocation. A perfect feature for travelers who want to keep aware of local tweeters as they change areas. (Note, some providers and corporate networks will struggle to accurately display your current location). Btw he calls this type of thing a "Kevinnovation". Patent pending.
- Gadfly Picks. This feature from George Durzi has some HUGE potential. Here's how it works: you rate tweets you love (5), hate (1) or whatever and Gadlfy starts to learn your preferences. As Gadfly Picks' algorithm starts to identify other Gadfly users that have similar likes/dislikes as you, you'll start to see Gadfly Picks populate with ~3 recommended tweeter's timelines. The Picks are regenerated each hour, so if you don't like some of the recommendations, just rank their tweets with a lower score and they'll drop out of your Gadfly Picks from now on. You can also check out George's post for more info.
So there are a few of my favorite additions, I really hope you give Gadfly a try. And PLEASE send feature requests, bugs and comments to me via blog comments or on twitter @steveholstad. And if you have any postive feedback we'll take that too, as anything helps to bring Lee back from the virtual world he's been living in.
The Gadfather.
http://gadfly.claritycon.com