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Goodbye to Opacity: Alert Thingy goes V 1.1

After being buried under a barrage of negative criticism when it was released just yesterday, Alert Thingy today released version 1.1 of its FriendFeed desktop application.

Some changes that make the app already a bit better:

+ You can turn off opacity
+ only shows the last three comments on a given item and then lets you choose if you want to see the rest (“Show all 9 comments”) – see this screenshot for an example. Strangely, the “Show all x comments” stays on the screen even after you have already clicked it…
+ doesn’t steal focus from other open apps anymore when it updates
+ settings allow you to no show the app at startup or not
+ comment box seems larger (but I might be wrong here) – still doesn’t expand with more text, though

There is still no control over text size, something Steven Hodson bemoaned greatly in his review, but I’m glad to see Howard/Baines are taking the criticism to heart and are working on improving the app.

It is still not the transformative app I had hoped for and I’m still sticking with using FF on the web for now, but the developers are moving in the right direction.

I still wish they had released a beta version, though, so that we could have voiced our opinions and they could have made changes before releasing a 1.0 version.

I tried v 1.0. Not there yet. I totally support this product but on your review of 1.1, I’m sticking with web access for now. I had a suspicious crash that I wondered if was attributable to AT. Then was a little annoyed that AT had installed itself to startup when I log in. Its not the most auspicious launch I’ve seen lately. Hoping the code first and think later style will get us a stable, full-featured tool in a hurry, though. Thanks for the quick review.

It’s really not quite ‘there’ yet – but it’s early in the game, so I’m not quite willing to give up on them yet, but the app needs a few more development/constructive criticism cycles.