Proxi Blog

link: Bubbles! v0.1

Earlier this week, I was showing some guys here a little demo app that I had put together at home. This demo was nothing more than balls that could be grabbed and thrown around the screen, but the response was really positive. In fact there were several ideas of things that could be done with this bouncing ball simulator. One of the ideas (among many!) was to take Proxi’s existing Screen Message task and place the message in a bubble with perhaps a title hinting at the contents inside. Not only would this sort of notification save some screen real estate, but these balls were just a lot of fun to casually toss around the screen while reading email or puzzling over a problem.

Armed with a practical (to some) use for this creation, I carved out a chunk of time this week to see if I could put something together for use in Proxi before the end of the week and my trip to WWDC. The result is the Bubbles! task. It’s still a bit rough around the edges, but for the most part seems to work pretty well. I’ve already moved most of my RSS Monitoring and Digg Monitoring into Bubbles and have been able to add a few more feeds, since the really small bubbles are pretty unobtrusive.

Anyway, try it out. Let me know what you think. If it proves to be a popular task, we’ll work on refining it and moving it into the core Proxi components perhaps.

One other thing: I made a demonstration movie showing how I’m using Bubbles. I apologize for the sound. It’s a bit low, but it gets the point across I think. J fixed the sound for me and it’s much better now. Thanks!