The first version of my G+ Notifier is now live, ready to download!

The first version is pretty basic, but it's still incredibly useful. It sits in the notification area and shows how many unread notifications you have (and shows balloons periodically). Double-clicking the icon (or single-clicking a balloon) will launch Google+ in your default browser.

For full info and a download link, visit gplusnotifier.com!

I recently picked up some domains for my next open source project - G+ Notifier. It's a simple Windows utility that'll sit in the notification area and alert you to notifications from Google+! Similar to my previous Google Wave Notifier, but hopefully Google won't discontinue this service quite so quick!

I'm not sure if I'll be able to launch the application before Google+ gets a public API, but I'll do some investigation over the coming days.

If you want to be kept informed with the progress of the app, please follow G+ Notifier on Google+, I'll post all updates on that account :-)

The website for the application is gplusnotifier.com and will also be updated regularly. Full source code will be hosted on Bitbucket!

Over the last few days, I noticed Google Wave Notifier complaining of login issues. I finally got around to looking at the problem today, and unfortunately, it's not good...

With no Google Wave API, when I wrote Google Wave Notifier, I had to scrape the pages and parse text out of some JSON to figure out what your new messages were. Knowing this was likely to change, GWN was written to alert the user if the parsing failed, explaining there had probably been an update to Google Wave, and GWN would be updated soon.

Unfortunately, Google changed the way Wave works recently, and I've been unable to figure out a way I can make GWN continue to function without significant changes. Since Google are ditching Wave soon anyway, I've decided not to invest the time required to make these changes.

It was great fun to work on an open source project that was downloaded by thousands of users across the many versions, but sadly that journey has come to an end. I'd like to give a huge thank you to all of the people that used GWN and reported bugs, spurring me on to continue developing. And let's not forget everyone that contributed a translation, allowing GWN, unlike other Wave notifiers, to be used all around the world.

I'm sure I'll find other little projects to work on with some of the spare time I have, and I'll be sure to post updates here. Subscribe to the RSS Feed or follow me on Twitter for updates!

Version 1.9 of Google Wave Notifier is now available. Unfortunately I didn't get around to adding Google Apps support, because it's turning out to be more complicated than expected, but I'm still hoping to have it done soon. The new features in v1.9 are:

• Changed source code over to Mercurial from SVN :)
• Added ability to customise the URL used to open Wave to support options like "minimized:nav,minimized:contact".
• Reduced minimum poll frequency to 1 minute.
• Added code to check for the presence of a network before checking for new waves in the background.

Fore more info, visit the Google Wave Notifier website or go direct to the Google Code project page for the download.

The source code for Google Wave Notifier is available (using Mercurial), so if you're got an idea for some new features, I'm open to acceptable patches!

For further updates on Google Wave Notifier, you can follow @WaveNotifier on Twitter!

Yesterday I finally got around to do something I've been planning on doing for a number of weeks. I uploaded Google Wave Notifier to Google Code. From today, Google Wave Notifier is Open Source!

In hindsight, I should have done this much sooner. The app is now very stable and contains all the features that I planned to implement (and more!). I'm still getting lots of feature requests, and I really wish I could implement them all. However, in reality, I just don't have time. By sharing the code with the world, all of these features need not go unimplemented!

I still intend to work through bugs and some feature requests myself, though it's unlikely to be at the rate of previous releases. With help from the community, hopefully we'll still see regular releases and new functionality.

For more info, or to download the source, please visit the Google Wave Notifier page on Google Code.