Those of you following our discussions on our group, having installed Snarl newly or have auto update activated within your Snarl installation probably already noticed that Snarl 2.3 is out now since some days already.

Chris did an awesome job - thanks Chris

I already summarized all the great new stuff in my recent postings here and here.

Have fun and give us feedback for the next versions

It has taken quite some time but today we are very happy to announce the immediate availability of the release candidate of our newest version of Snarl - find version 2.3 RC here.

I have summarized most of the new features already in this older news entry here - but there are some additional new features and goodies which are shipping with this release.

First of all you now can forward visual notifications to one or more non visual styles. Confused? Let me give you an example: You get a normal notification shown on your screen. Then you can define that this notification is additionally forwarded to Prowl (Push notification to your iPhone), spoken (using sayHello) and also send as email (using mailMe).*

Second we have three new styles - one is Clock which displays a nice clock (who might have guessed...) and is of course the ideal style for the hourly chime notification. Next is the Slideshow style with a clear focus on the notification image. Finally we have the IPForwarder style which can be used to forward notifications to other PCs over the network.

Additionally Snarl 2.3 is delivered with some extras and experimental extras. They can be found within the Snarl installation directory (normally C:\Program files\full phat\Snarl) and can optionally installed.

Extras:

• snaRSS: A Snarl app** which can be used to easily get notifications of new items in RSS feeds
• Paw 2: An application which listens for GNTP notifications (which is the protocol used by Growl for Windows) and forwards them to Snarl. This means additional to the apps with Snarl support you now also can use those apps which have a Growl integration on Windows (Growl for Mac does not use GNTP for the current official release but soon will too). A special thanks goes to Brian Dunnington (the developer of Growl for Windows) for providing the DLLs to get this working.

Experimental:

• SnarlWare: Yes, it is back. The fine small tool which alerts you on changes in your Windows setup (e. g. an USB stick is inserted)
• SnarlTray: Captures the standard Windows tray notifications (balloon notifications) and displays them as Snarl notifications

* Just noticed I already mentioned this in the original news post - anyway - this time I wrote more explanation

** Snarl apps are applications which bring some features to Snarl but are not fully blown own applications. Instead they are administered within Snarl. As soon as the used new API is ported to C# quite some more tools will use it instead of having all own tray icons - planned first one will be Paw.

Chris and I have been running this release without major issue since February this year so we thought it would make sense to release it to the wider community.  Please be aware that it should still be considered an alpha release (as such, please assume it will be more buggy and unpredictable than a beta release).

R2.3A2 will replace any existing Snarl installation you already have (unless you tell the installer to install it somewhere else) but it will act as if Snarl has never been previously installed.  This means (a) the "first run" draw test window will appear and your existing settings will not be transferred.  Your pre-R2.3A2 settings will be preserved however.

SourceForge's 'new' file release system is as useless as always but, with a following wind, you should be able to find it under here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/snarlwin/files/Snarl/Latest%20Dev%20Release/

During the last weeks Chris has worked hard on the next upcoming release of Snarl. Snarl 2.3 now already has had multiple internal alpha releases in closed testing and I want to take the opportunity to give you an overview what you can expect to get when it's done:

"Visible features" for the user:

• Notification forwarding: Get a notification on screen and additionally send the same to a non visual style (like Prowl or Say Hello)
• Some beautiful new styles:
  
• Advanced notification classes settings
  
• Alerts now have three priorities:
   o low: one single notification - updated step by step (no flooding with unimportant notifications)
   o normal
   o priority
• Priority level can now be send from the application (and being overwritten by user of course)
• New extension in package:
   o KeyLock: shows state changes to the toggle keys like Shift Lock
   o WiFi Monitor: monitors WiFis (who would have thought by the name...
   o TMinus: easily start a small countdown to alert you when your eggs are done (or similar)
• Away mode: Snarl detects if user is not at the PC and changes notification behaviour in this case

• Extension API completly reworked
• JSON-API now available over HTTP (so can be initiated very easily now within browsers)
• Priority can be send from app
• Logging now included directly into the app and cleaned up

And many more small tweaks and changes...

Happy new year 2010 to all of you!

As a first gift I updated this homepage today to show you all the cool new stuff we have since the last blog post.

In the apps section there are two new apps: WaveSnarler which notifies you about new waves in your Google Wave and L4D2Banlist which helps you if you play using Steam.

Next is a bunch of new styles here on the homepage. I added Music Video and Prowl to the styles sections - they are both part of Snarl 2.21 but I missed to list them here. And we have three new styles which will do some nasty stuff with your notifications: speak it, send it as SMS and send it as email.

Finally Alex provided a new style called "Rewind"which looks very nice in my oppinion.

Some updates on new apps having Snarl support embedded:

• Cardinal: A Twitter client neither written with Adobe Air nor .NET - and because of this faster than most of the others
• uGrowl: uTorrent plugin to get notifications on finished downloads
• WinampSnarl: An alternative to the already existing Winamp plugin - this one has advanced support for foreign languages / characters sets and cover art
• Panorama: A database development solution
• IdelMaiCheck: A Perl script showing notifications with IMAP Idle

Snarl 2.21 has just been uploaded to sourceforge.net so you can download it now. Please stop Snarl 2.2 prior to install the new version.

So what's new in this release? As you might notice it is just a minor update so it's main goal is to fix some smaller issues which have been in 2.2. The most important fix is that unticking an extension in the Snarl settings now is saved (again) correctly. Another fix is that you don't need to stop Snarl manually on upgrading to future versions.

Additionally to bugfixing there have been some enhancements to the APIs. Here the most important key is that you can now provide an URL (http and https) as path to an image. This is included in both the Win32 API as well as in the SNP API. And yes, this also means that SNP now features icons for the first time at all - will update the docs in the near future - developers using SNP just need to add an &icon=http://... to have this feature (it is already included in the Perl SNP include files - C# to follow in a short time).

Also with Snarl 2.2 the bundled extension SnarlMon had been discontinued as a newer, better, nicer, ... version is about to be embedded with one of the next Snarl versions. As many requests stated you are missing those notifications on hardware changes we made it available as separate download now.

Finally Snarl now has it's own Twitter-account with news all about Snarl, apps and styles.

Just some days ago I wrote about access to our homepage is sky rocketing. If I stay with this picture today we reached outer space as Lifehacker once again wrote some lines about Snarl yesterday. We have now already today more visitors as on our sky rocket day - and it's 8am(!) here so 16 more hours to go. So once again hello to all you new Snarl users

And as I am writing a new blog post anyway I take the chance to welcome our newest app supporting Snarl:

• CommitMonitor [Dev tools]: Monitors Subversion repositories for new commits and shows a notification to the user when that happens.

And finally we got some new submissions for styles and while updating the styles list I finally found the time to also add my own Tweet it style which forwards notifications to Twitter as Tweets

Wow - I just can't believe what I see since yesterday in our usage statistics right now. Since Download Squad mentioned Snarl yesterday our visitors counters are just sky rocketing - so hello to all you new users. Also there have been some Tweets at Twitter and some blog posts since yesterday and I wanna thank you all writing about Snarl

And even better also the number of apps supporting Snarl is also growing faster than I can update the homepage in the moment (as I am most of the time only online using my iPhone those vacation days )

So since our last blog post about new Snarl apps there have been those new submissions to the homepage:

• OWA Tray Monitor: [Web related]: An Outlook Web Access New Mail Notification Tool.
• SiSterB [Web related]: SisterB is a site specific browser developed in Delphi 2009 for Windows.
• Desktop Google Reader [Web related]: Desktop Google Reader is a client to the very popular news aggregation service Google Reader. It let's you view all your unread items, starr them, mark them as read and of course shows Snarl notifications on new entries
• SiFiEx [Web related]: A small PHP driven web app to turn your webspace to a place to easily exchange files only by using a standard web browser. Support Snarl both using it's JSON API as well as the Firefox-extension Yip!
• jWeatherWatch [Misc]: jWeatherWatch is an Open-Source Java based platform independent Weather client for AccuWeather. You can watch different locations and get notifications on current weather changes, and changes in the forecast.

This may be once again a good time to gice you the hint that there is a dedicated RSS feed which shows new submissions of applications to this homepage which can be found here: http://www.fullphat.net/media/extensionNews/index.rss.

And finally the work on Snarl 2.2.1 is making some significant progress. It will fix the annoying bug with Extensions settings, bring a new better Prowl version and will remote icon URLs (for developers).

Within the last days the number of apps supporting Snarl has once again increased very much. So we wanna give you a short update about some new apps which have recently been added to the list of apps with Snarl support:

• AutotestForPHP: [Dev] Tool for running tests as soon as files get changed.
• MusicBee: {MediaPlayer]: Organize and play your music library
• Yip!: [Web related]: Firefox extension which adds Snarl notification to a growing number of web applications like e g. Meebo
• GRaiN: [Web related]: Notifications for Google Reader
• WeatherSnarl: [Misc]: Show current weather as well as a forecast
• NetSnarl: [Misc]: Interface Snarl using HTTP
• POP Peeper: [Web related]: An email notifier that supports POP3, IMAP, Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail, and many other webmail services.

Finally Chris and I are just finishing some documentation on how to build an own full-featured style. When done this tutorial will also feature example in VB6 and C#. As a first outcome (I tend to learn by doing ) I've got a C# style which forwards your Snarl notifications to Twitter.

As it looks like Prowl is a feature which is just bringing many, many new users to Snarl. So first of all: welcome and have fun

To make new users of Snarl the setup of Prowl notifications a little bit easier I just want to give you a short documentation on how to push your notifications to Snarl.

If everything goes as planned the release to the public is scheduled for monday.

Wouldn't it be cool to forward some notifications from Snarl directly to your iPhone? Say e. g. you left your chat client open and get push notifications on your phone while on your way through your company? Or think about reminders in Sunbird or new Tweets in Witty...

So this could be another reason for you being happy to get Snarl 2.2 when it's done...

What you see here is a notification of the current weather here in Bavaria (yeah, it's not that good in the moment...) which has been sent using the app "WeatherSnarl". Snarl 2.2 gets a new style called "Prowl" which will use the iPhone app "Prowl".

So with Snarl 2.2 you will be able to send any notifications directly to your iPhone - I already fell in love with this feature

Snarl 2.2 is making continuous progress and starting today we are making a first beta version available to the public. Let me start with some general words: Snarl 2.2 is called beta because it actually is a beta. So we know not everything is working 100% as expected out of the knowledge that not everything has been tested as it would have been for an official release. Also please be aware that the configuration format has been changed - so if you wnat to try it please make a backup of you Snarl configuration to be able to go back to 2.1.

But now to what's new - and it's a quite long list... Let's start with the reworked styles engine. Chris has spent quite much work on the styles interface and this brings some great new features to the styles.

• New meter styles available: there are now possibilities to have so called meter styles which display progress which can be measured as percentage in a graphical way as a progress bar or a graph (see screenshots of "Just black" below)
• Do not disturb-mode: when activated notifications are not shown but are stored in a list of missed notifications.
  
  And of course you can have a look at this list of missed notifications when coming back from Do not disturb-mode
  
• Priority notification: the user can define alert classes as being priority ones. This means they are displayed if you are in Do not disturb-mode or not. This also can mean (if the style supports it) that the notification is highlighted (e. g. glowing red)
• Notifications can be defined as being only shown but not being clickable but instead going transparency and click through when hovering with the mouse over them
  
• Styles can be set to have a certain transparency now and a definable drop shadow can be applied (as all the following screenshots will have)

So as an outcome there are some new styles available with Snarl 2.2:

• New default style (heavily inspired by the original default style of Snarl 1.x )
  
• Just Black shows you all the possibilities of the new styles engine - see screenshots including a progress bar and and a graph
  
  
  
• iPhoney brings the look of alerts on the iPhone / iPod touch to Snarl - see second screenshot for a priority notification (but you don't see here that the red is pulsing when displayed...)
  
  
  Also see the mirror effect for the displayed icon.
• Also there are some more styles planned for the 2.2 release including a banner style, a SMTP-style (sends email) and the many times having been wished speak style (all of them already being in internal beta test)

New better extension management will be available too. While the interface in 2.1 has been reworked in many places it now in 2.2 is even better and this has been the reason why the interface never has been documented for 2.1. Some new extensions will be included as a notification for changing sound volume (as you can do right now alread with SnarlOSD here in the apps section) and a completly rewritten SnarlClock+ which finally will bring everything what the settings dialog of the old one teasered (but in Public Beta 1 it's unfinished until now).

These are the most important news about 2.2 - but there are quite some more under the hood. One of those is the "What's new" that you get displayed when starting 2.2 (and there you can read some more... )

We are happy getting your feedback in our forum