I've just released an update to Catfood Follower. Follower is a tool for Twitter users that allows you to find and remove friends who have stopped following you. It also allows you to automatically follow anyone who starts following you (but does not send automatic DMs).
Follower 1.10 is much better at handling Twitter API limits. Rather than failing to update it will wait until the current limits expire and then keep going. It will work much better for people with many accounts, friends, or followers. 1.10 also uses the new cursor method for paging through lists which is more reliable.
There's also a new window that shows progress when automatically processing rules:
This is now the default when running Follower.exe with no command line argument. If you prefer the old behavior run Follower.exe /silent and the update will run without any notification.
It's also now possible to cancel Follower, either from the test window or when running automatically (as long as you're not using the /silent switch).
Catfood Earth updates your Desktop wallpaper to show a satellite image of the Earth's surface combined with many optional layers of information. Layers include cloud cover, the extent of daylight and nightime, time zones and earthquakes. The result is a beautiful and continually changing background for your computer.
Earth is an update to Catfood Desktate. Existing Desktate customers can upgrade to Earth at no cost. If you're new to Earth download the free 7 day trial or purchase Earth for $19.95 from the Catfood Store.
New themes make it easy to configure Earth with the recommended settings for a number of views. The Natural theme approximates Earth from space. Time Zones color codes countries and regions and updates throughout the year as daylight savings rules change around the world. Earthquakes shows quake data from the USGS.
Once you've selected a theme you can fully customize each layer, including colors, text size, image sources and transparency.
I'd like to thank all the beta testers who provided feedback and encouragement over the past few months. People use Earth for lots of different reasons and the flexibility in 3.00 is due to learning more about this from both long time Desktate customers and new Earth users.
Catfood Earth supports Windows XP, Vista and 7. Download Earth to get started.
The first shows time zone changes in 2009. You'll see various countries and regions changing zone as they enter and leave daylight savings time. The animation compresses an entire year into a few seconds:
The second is an update to Seasons, a video created in Catfood Desktate. It shows the extent of daylight and nighttime over the course of a year. You can also see snow and ice cover and vegetation growing and dying back - barely noticeable in Catfood Earth but dramatic in the animation:
The videos were created by rendering a sequence of frames in Catfood Earth. I then used ImageToAVI to create an animation from the frames and uploaded to YouTube. The render frames feature will be available in the full release of Catfood Earth 3.00.
I've added the final two layers to the Catfood Earth beta - Political Borders and Places. The Places layer now includes time zones and has the option to display the current local time for each location.
There's also a new Themes tab that allows you to configure Catfood Earth for common display modes in a single click. The current themes are: Natural (daylight, nighttime and clouds), Time Zones (color coded countries and political borders) and Earthquakes.
Catfood Earth is pretty close now. There's a bit of tidying left to do and a few more minor features to add. Download Catfood Earth Beta from the original blog post.
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