Away messages not "stacking" how I had hoped/expected.

[devfuel]

Trowl has that wonderful feature of only checking for updates every N
minutes. This is excellent for people (like me) who get distracted
everytime a tweet comes in. Currently I use a 15 minute interval. That
way, every 15 minutes I get a brief distraction as I click through the
stack of tweets that have shown up. Again, this is great from a
logical standpoint, an excellent feature, and well implemented.

However, I have two questions as to the presentation of the stacked up
messages: Growl for windows has a feature that allows messages that
arrive while you are "away" to get different settings. I set this to
make missed tweets "sticky" (so they don't go away until I dismiss
them). If I received 10 messages while I was away, I have one growl
system message saying I missed something and one Trowl message with
the "first" tweet. Both messages are displaying at the same time (I
use different ui for system and trowl messages) and I have to
"dismiss" them both. Shouldn't there just be one? Is this something i
can configure away?

Secondly, rather than using growls ability to stack up queued messages
on the screen until dismissed, the stack of trowl messages all display
one at a time. With my display settings, I should see, say, 10 new
tweets on the screen waiting for me to dismiss them individually. If
there are actually 15 stacked up, then dismissing the first five would
cause them to be replaced with the "background" five that were waiting
to be displayed. At least that was what I expected. Is Trowl waiting
for the "first" tweet to be dismissed before sending the next one? Or
is this a problem with Growl for windows? Or is this something I have
misconfigured? (I have Growl 2.0.1 build 2.0.0.27)

Anyway. I really like the way trowl and growl are making twitter less
obtrusive and yet still allow me to keep up with the stream of
multiple accounts. Thanks for all of your hard work!

[Mageuzi]

Thanks for the feedback :) This is actually something I've been
thinking about recently.

Let me start with giving a brief overview of how Trowl sends growl
notifications. Essentially, your guess is correct. It checks for new
tweets every N minutes. Lets say there are three new tweets when it
does a check. It will send the first tweet, by itself, to growl. It
then waits for growl to notify that the user has seen it and closed
it. Then it will send the second tweet by itself, and wait again.
And finally, the third tweet. At any time during the process if N
minutes pass, it doesn't check for new tweets -- it waits for you to
address your current tweets first.

I set it up this way because when I first created Trowl, I was getting
5... 10... 15 notifications appearing on my screen at once, and this
was distracting, to say the least.

So, your first point is happening because you tell Growl to make
notifications sticky on away. Growl is also showing you the "while
you were" away summary, presumably to cover the case where
notifications weren't set as sticky but you might want to see anyway.
There is only one notification, because of the behavior of Trowl.

Your second point is entirely due to how Trowl works, as described
above. I've wondered if maybe it would be better to display five at a
time, instead of one. Or make it a configurable number. Or maybe it
should just show all notifications at once -- but again, this really
made the screen crowded when I did this originally.

I'd love to hear some feedback on this point, as I think the process
could be improved.

[Mageuzi]

I guess I should just clarify that this is only an issue if you use
the "sticky" function of notifications. If you let the notifications
fade in and out automatically, then everything more or less works as
you would expect -- but you will only see one notification at a time.

If you went away from your computer and came back, you would see
Growl's history display with all the tweets that came in while you
were gone. Of course, by that point you wouldn't be able to use the
reply/retweet/dm buttons on the display.

Anyway, I'm still curious if anyone has feedback on this behavior.

[devfuel]

Since tweets are the only thing I really care to review after i am
"away", I disabled the away feature in Growl, letting Trowl manage
that. This does smooth out (very) minor issue #1 for me. That said,
getting Trowl to work via Growl's "away" feature would be helpful if I
come across another situation in which i need to enable Growl's away.

As for #2, I do think that having a configurable number of "on
screen", "while away" tweets would be useful (as opposed to just one).
That way it wouldn't clutter the whole screen (as you mention), but I
could still see a batch of incoming tweets at once. If I had such a
setting, I would simply set it to the number of tweets I could
comfortably view in one vertical stack (~5 for me, i think).

Is it possible to have Trowl send a configurable number of tweets to
growl, and then wait for the last to be dismissed before sending the
next batch? Then (presuming that an message growl got while i was
"Away" can be displayed in a per-application UI) I could use Growl's
away feature...anyway...just a few uninformed thoughts.

However, this is not a terribly high priority for me. I'd certainly be
willing to wait on something as cosmetic as this if you were working
on growling twitter searches :D

[devfuel]

So I thought I'd describe how I'd ultimately want Trowl/Growl to
behave, given some further thought:

I receive a batch of tweets at a fixed interval. If they number fewer
than DISPLAY_THRESHOLD, then they are all displayed as sticky. Thus I
can read and dismiss them individually, optionally clicking on links,
Retweeting, Responding, etc..

If I receive more than DISPLAY_THRESHOLD, then only DISPLAY_THRESHOLD
of the tweets are displayed. Dismissing one of the currently
displayed, sticky tweets would display one of the undisplayed tweets
queued in the background until all received tweets have been
dismissed.

Really I want the same behavior for tweets received while I was away.

This almost feels like a Growl feature
(STICKY_MESSAGE_DISPLAY_THRESHOLD?) rather than a Trowl one, but
*shrug*.

Anyway. Thanks for your time and consideration. I don't know that
everyone will want things this way, but at least this is one guy's
feedback. Trowl/Growl is currently VERY useful to me, and this would
just be icing on the cake.

[Mageuzi]

I think this is a very good idea, and it should be fairly easy to give
a setting to show a variable number of notifications at a time -- or
everything all at once if that's your preference. I'm also going to
see how difficult it would be for Trowl to keep checking for new
tweets, and add them to the list of undisplayed tweets, even if all
the previous tweets haven't been dismissed.

Of course, these would apply to whether you're using your computer or
you're away. So if you have sticky notifications, Growl will still
only "see" whatever you have your "display threshold" set to, until
you get back.

Thanks again for your feedback, it's great to hear what people like
and don't like :)