7 Ways to Improve Alert Thingy

April 13, 2008

The Adobe AIR client, Alert Thingy, for FriendFeed launched. While it shows great potential, and is very young at version 1.0, there are areas that it can definitely improve. I’ve been using it for about an hour now and while I like it, there are some frustrating points which I believe should be addressed.

Here are 7 reasons that I’ve already sent the author:

Finite control of transparency and colors. People are picky about this one. While I like the default color scheme, others might not. The default transparency could use a slider control as well.
Control of how many comments to show in the window. Maybe there’s a way to collapse comments similar to the way FriendFeed does. Just look at Bret Taylor’s post on FriendFeed as an example.
This may go to point 1, but I think we need an option to dress up the service icons a bit. If you introduce a theming system, maybe it could address this.
Please honor FriendFeed’s “hide” settings. I’m seeing things on Alert Thingy that are hidden on Friendfeed.com. This is a high priority one in my opinion.
I don’t know if this one is possible, but it would be nice to bring FriendFeed’s “hide” ability to the client.
The ability to show the “everyone” feed in the client
Search ability for the “everyone” feed

So there you have it. I’m sure these will be addressed in some form or fashion and I look forward to using Alert Thingy more and more.