Ahah, you though that I was sleeping, right? But I wasn't! SteemWatch 0.6.0 is here!
For those still lost, SteemWatch is a notification center for Steemit.com that anybody can sign up to.
Release Notes
As usual, you can find rather detailed release notes on GitHub, but let me skim through the most interesting changes. And there are quite a few!
Event Stream: User-Related Events Are Highlighted
When using the Event Stream, the events related to your account are highlighted, except the descendant.published event, where it is not so simple to get the post author for the comment. I will definitely try to fix this in the future.
In any case, to insert your Steem account name to get event highlighting, click on your email address in the top navigation bar and insert the account names you are interested in. These will get highlighted in the stream.
Event Stream: Desktop Notifications
The Event Stream now emits browser desktop notifications. For now it just tells you periodically how many new events were inserted into the stream, but this can and will be improved in the future.
New Notifier Module: Steemit Chat
And here goes the most interesting announcement! It is now possible to go to the Notifications page and enable notifications for Steemit Chat.
Since Steemit Chat is based on Rocket Chat, which is aiming to be compatible with Slack, the payload sent to the chat is the same as for the Slack module. There is definitely space for improvements, but that can come in the future.
Special thanks go to @riverhead for hacking Nginx to work around Rocket Chat CORS issues.
What Is Next?
I would like to make it possible for people to log in with their Steemit account, but I am basically waiting for someone to come up with an authentication mechanism since I don't want to be handling Steemit username/password in my application manually.
Another enhancement could be to integrate with Steemit FOLLOW button.
Otherwise I am going to be improving existing features and planning major SteemWatch rewrite to make it scalable and more robust. This should also introduce buffering and history into the Event Stream. This will take quite some time, though, so this is really a longer-term goal.
Support
As usual, any support is greatly appreciated. SteemWatch is a free service for now. You can just upvote this post, or donate my effort directly if you feel like doing so.
In any case, have fun with SteemWatch, I hope that you like the improvements!
Oh, yeah, and feel free to join steemwatch channel on Steemit Chat to discuss SteemWatch and get updated on the current plans and new feature deployment.