Proxi Blog

The introduction of digg v3 brought with it the addition of a lot of categories for the stories posted there along with many other features. So it seemed a good time to turn my attention to a better Digg Monitor for Proxi.

Digg Monitor v0.2 adds support for monitoring only those categories of news interesting to you. This also makes it easier to assign a different set of tasks to items that fall in one category versus another. The available categories are:

• All Stories
• Technology
• Apple, Design, Gadgets, Hardware, Industry News, Linux / Unix, Mods, Programming, Security, Software, Tech Deals
• Science
• Space, Environment, Health, General Sciences
• World & Business
• Business & Finance, Politics, World News, Offbeat News
• Videos
• Animation, Comedy, Educational, Music, People, Gaming
• Entertainment
• Celebrity, Movies, Music, Television
• Gaming
• Gaming News, Playable Web Games

In addition to being able to monitor stories dugg by digg users and the friends of digg users, there is now support for monitoring stories submitted or commented on a particular digg user or friends. Where applicable, the Digg Monitor will set the new “Friends” value to a comma separated list of friends that have commented on or dugg a story. And finally, the error reporting has been cleaned up. No longer will a broken feed or internet connection bring up an annoying dialog box. Errors are reported in the settings view and indicated by a caution icon in your trigger list.

Download the Digg Monitor for Prox.
Of course the Digg Monitor requires Proxi for Mac OS X.

For additional information see the Digg Monitor entry in the wiki.

OK so this was supposed to be done yesterday, but shiny things distracted me as they often do. But here’s part two of the promised example code.

Mailer

This is one of those tasks I would’ve liked to include in the core suite included with Proxi but there are a few lingering questions about it. The MessageFramework, on which this is based, is sparsely documented and I’m not sure Apple’s commitment to it. It also requires that you’ve configured Mail correctly, i.e. you’re not using some other email application. So I was kind of on the fence about this one. Maybe it’ll become part of the core suite in a new release. Maybe not.

Anyway, this task is also pretty straightforward. Gather some info using 2 GValueTextField’s (these are new as of Proxi v1.1 and so they haven’t rippled completely through Proxi yet) and one GValueTextView. Those allow specially formatted text to appear as Value tokens.

The instructions for this task bundle are the same as for the trigger: Grab the source, compile with XCode, throw the bundle in /Library/Application Support/Proxi/PlugIns/ and restart Proxi. If you built it right and I didn’t screw something up, you should see Mailer in your task list.

For more information on creating your own triggers and task, check this article.

Source: mail.zip
Proxipedia: Mailer Task

For some time I’ve been meaning to put together a sample Trigger and Task bundle to aid those wanting to create their own specialized components. And lately I’ve had a request for this as well, so I spent a little time today putting together part one of a this two part project.

Stock Quote

I wanted to do a little bit more than a Hello World, but nothing to complicated that it took away from demonstrating the basic principles. I had portions of this code laying about to grab a stock quote via a SOAP call, so I decided to roll that into a trigger.

This is a pretty basic trigger. It asks for a stock symbol (AAPL is always a good one to test with) and also has a slider to set the update interval.

So, if your curious, grab the source, compile with XCode, throw the bundle in /Library/Application Support/Proxi/PlugIns/ and restart Proxi. If you built it right and I didn’t screw something up, you should see Stock Quote in your trigger list.

For more information on creating your own triggers and task, check this article that I posted a while back. I’ll try and post a sample task tomorrow.

Source: quote.zip
Proxipedia: Stock Quote

link: Proxi v1.1

In this update:

• Added radioSHARK trigger (requires radioSHARK v2.0.1)
• Added radioSHARK task (requires radioSHARK v2.0.1)
• Added Battery monitor task
• RSS Monitor errors now display in the RSS settings view
• RSS Monitor now correctly handles more varieties of feeds
• Fixed a problem where unnamed triggers did not appear to be selectable
• Installer now checks to make sure Mac OS X 10.4 is installed
• Help index now links to actual help.

For those interested in in staying on the cutting edge of Proxi releases, there is a blueprint that will let you switch Proxi to the beta software feed. You can get the blueprint here:

Feed Switcher

It works by triggering on a hotkey (control-option-B) which will execute a shell script that changes the location where Proxi looks for new updates. You may want to relaunch Proxi if it doesn’t seem to “notice” the change right away. A trigger is also available to switch back to the regular feed (control-option-R).

If you feel more comfortable executing these commands in the Terminal then you can forego the blueprints and executing the following in the Terminal:

Beta: defaults write com.griffintechnology.Proxi SUFeedURL http://proxi.griffintechnology.com/software/ProxiCastBeta.xml
Release: defaults write com.griffintechnology.Proxi SUFeedURL http://proxi.griffintechnology.com/software/ProxiCast.xml

If you switch to the beta feed, you’ll notice a new release of Proxi is available. Version 1.1 adds these items:

• Added radioSHARK trigger (requires radioSHARK v2.0.1)
• Added radioSHARK task (requires radioSHARK v2.0.1)
• Added Battery monitor task
• RSS Monitor errors now display in the RSS settings view
• RSS Monitor now correctly handles more varieties of feeds
• Fixed a problem where unnamed triggers did not appear to be selectable