I notice a lot of people I send to the Massive Assault series dont like the fact they need Massive Assault open, or have Outlook constantly open, to see if there are new turns. So I'm working on a little community program to help keep track of new turns/challenges automatically in the "background" during computer use.
I want a program to stay unabtrusive and check with Massive Assaults site for events happening related to your MAN account, such as new turns. So far I've written a program that when loaded puts itself in the start menu tray (Windows obviously). Each set interval of time it will check for new turns and challenges and very similar to MSN Messenger, will scroll a little message with a short description of data it found, sort of a quick alert of new information for your account. The icon changes from its default (nothing found), to an icon that represents the data it found. That way you can tell visually if you want to see the info it received.
Im going to try to work with the MA/N team for them to make a script that outputs the data in a parsable format such as XML, so my program and the MAN site are integrated with each other.
Things I'd like to know:
#1 What data should this "MassTray" look for?
#2 When you double click the icon and it displays the newly found information, any ideas on how it should present this information? I'm talking mostly GUI type stuff, how should it look?
#3 Any special features you can think of that would be good for this tool?
#4 What should this tool be called?
From talks with PR and such, this tool will be a reality, so I want it to be as useful for the Massive Assault lovers as possible.
-Fraggler