Notify Me! is a Windows Store app for keeping up to date with Bukkit plugins stored on bukkitdev.org
While BukkitDev is a great place for putting your plugins and having a place where admins and devs can find each other, the notification system leaves a lot to be desired.
The biggest issues are that you receive email notifications for your own comments, that users don’t receive any notification of responses to their bug tickets, and that forum posts don’t generate notifications at all.
This app attempts to alleviate all these problems and more
Features
- Get updates for comments, files, tickets, and forums
- Get updates for new posts and when posts are edited
- Ignore posts by specified users, or only receive posts from those users
- Background checking means you don’t need to keep the app running all the time
Get it!
You can find the app on the Windows Store here, available in a fully-functional ad-supported version with the possibility of upgrading to remove the ads.
Tutorial
The app is made up of two screens, one of which is for defining which plugin pages you are interested in watching. I’ll call this the page Screen. The other is for displaying the updates and I’ll call it the Update Screen.
Page Screen
This is where you define what plugin pages you would like to be notified about. You can get here from the Update Screen by tapping the Edit button on the app bar.
On this screen new plugin pages can be added by tapping the Add button on the app bar. This will popup a box where you can enter the page. The app is able to monitor multiple types of pages:
- Comments about the plugin
- New files released by the plugin author(s)
- Bug tickets made about the plugin
- Forum posts
Please note that only tickets and forums using BukkitDev’s own system can be monitored. Plugins which link to external bug trackers or forums won’t work.
Bug tickets and forums have an additional feature in that individual tickets and forum threads can be monitored, as well as tickets and forums generally.
Examples are probably easier so as one of my own plugins, mobs, has each of these sections I’ll use it.
Comments
Comments are the simplest and only require you to enter the name of the plugin.
Files
Files need the name of the plugin, a forward-slash, and the word files
Forums
Forums need the name of the plugin, a forward-slash, and the word forum. It’s also possible to monitor an individual thread by providing the plugin name, a forward-slash, the word forum, another slash, and the thread’s number and title.
Bug tickets
Bug tickets need the name of the plugin, a forward-slash, and the word tickets. It’s also possible to monitor an individual ticket by providing the plugin name, a forward-slash, the word forum, another slash, and the ticket’s number and title.
All of these accept inputs starting with the plugin name, or the complete link.
Examples
- mobs
- http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/mobs/tickets
- http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/mobs/forum/44356-example-outcomes/#p7
- mobs/files
If you are monitoring a plugin’s general tickets or forums, and also specific tickets or threads then both will cause alerts when the individual page is updated.
Once you have entered the address, the app will check to see if the page is valid, and if so will add it to the list. Be sure to check the new page popup for any error messages if the popup doesn’t close itself.
It’s possible to customize how each plugin page is handled by the app. Simply click on any of the plugin pages on the Page Screen to display this panel:
The first section is for filtering the content. Enter a comma-separated list of user names in the box to ignore content posted by those users. This is most useful for ignoring your own content. Alternatively, tap the toggle switch to the right of the box to ignore all content not posted by those users. This can be used to only show content from the plugin author(s), for example.
Next we have the icon colour. You can select from a short list of colours to make it easier to see which plugin page is which. The same colour will be used on the Page Screen, the Update Screen, and on the popup alerts that appear when the page is updated.
To the right of that is a toggle switch which determines how long the popup alert will stay on the screen for. The default is 7 seconds, but can be extended to 25 seconds by togggling the switch.
You can stop monitoring the page by clicking the remove button.
Miscellaneous
There is a help button on the app bar which will display a legend explaining what each icon represents.
Plugin pages can be rearranged by dragging them into a different order.
Update screen
When the app is in the background it will check your pages for updates every 15 minutes as long as you are connected to the Internet and your device is connected to mains power. When a page has updated content you will see a popup appear in the corner of the screen, informing you how many unread updates there are for that page. These popups can be disabled from within Windows if desired. At the same time, the app’s tile on the Start screen will be updated to display the total unread updates of each page.
When a plugin page you are watching gets updated it will appear on this screen, along with how many and what types of updates. The example below shows that the plugin spawns has received three new comments, and one edited comment.
Tapping the update box will open a pane containing these four updates, with a button at the top to mark the updates as read. Tapping this button will clear all that plugin’s updates and remove it from the screen, or you can tap anywhere else to close the pane and leave the plugin there. The new and edited counters will reset to show that you have seen all the current updates.