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On Windows, you don't commonly have to ask other windows about whether they want to be part of your Multi-Document Interface, so I wrote a little Windows Forms application that lets you set up columns and insert windows into them.

I also wrote a little browser extension so that the column can auto-expand when clicking on images on Twitter/Cohost/Mastodon.

The result is amusing - you can have feeds from different social networks, or different accounts, or even non-browser things all inside one "dashboard".

#The Cohost Global Feed #TweetDeck

GoatyGoats.com/links (she 🐯)@goaty7/13/2023, 1:59 AM

i don't want to detract from what you've made, it's very cool and i'm sure a lot of people will find it extremely useful, but also it very much reminded me of "complete bullshit," the content aggregator program from the webcomic homestuck

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in reply to @YellowAfterlife's post:

Aleph Ren @aleph-ren7/12/2023, 9:26 PM

this is a very cool idea! but i'll probably never use it sadly. hopefully someone else will tho!

Christian Simmers @Xuelder7/12/2023, 9:44 PM

Which is really funny cause this was what Tweetdeck used to be.

Mike Sharpe, Writer @MikeSharpeWriter7/12/2023, 10:46 PM

Yeah, I remember when it was Foursquare, 12Seconds, even Facebook, and what ever Google's attempt at a social media thing at the time.

Vadym @YellowAfterlife7/12/2023, 10:58 PM

I caught just a whiff of it before the company was acquired by Twitter and it's been in the back of my mind ever since. A glimpse of convenience that could have been.

catboy enthusiast @janejana7/12/2023, 10:28 PM

Thank you :)

あれく @bitto7/12/2023, 10:36 PM

this is what I've accomplished for a long time with window tiling, but this sure is a lot nicer huh

Café Glacé @Emadea7/12/2023, 11:23 PM

so cool ! I'll give it a try, thx

💤That Sleepy Wuff💦@Zakail7/12/2023, 11:39 PM

this is awesome! any chance for a dark theme for it? it's a little eye-blasting currently.

Vadym @YellowAfterlife7/13/2023, 10:29 AM

Added that - there's now a little theme editor in the settings window.

The tool with the default dark theme that mimics my blog's dark mode

@Ongion7/13/2023, 12:33 AM

This feels incredibly cursed. Well done!

misato @BelladonnaToxin7/13/2023, 6:14 AM

thank you for my fucking life ???

M. Neko @mneko7/14/2023, 4:14 AM

Did you buy the Switch version of Game Tengoku, by the way? Cha-ding buddies forever!

misato @BelladonnaToxin7/17/2023, 3:11 PM

sorry for the late reply! i have it on steam and got the original saturn and playstation versions instead x3

tea @sadteaparty7/13/2023, 7:05 PM

this is a delight, thank you!
my only (probably very niche, difficult, and selfish) future hope would be for some way to support multiple rows, by capping the vertical height. use case i'm thinking of would be having something like a 2x3 layout on a vertical monitor.
this is already so useful though, what a wonder.

Vadym @YellowAfterlife7/13/2023, 7:32 PM

I'd like to support multiple windows with their own columns at the very least. That would allow for a similar effect except for when expanding a column.

A multi-row layout sounds somewhat doable, but will take a bit of work to arrange the columns and also some mechanism to specify row heights (in pixels? Percentages? Both?)

tea @sadteaparty7/13/2023, 9:14 PM

any permutation sounds lovely, including the multiple window option. the lightbox effect would presumably be constrained to any single window, but honestly that's still better than anything we had going on in tweetdeck and its cohort, as this is so far into the New Functionality Zone.

i could probably see cases for pixels or percents (or both); from my narrow view either would be completely fine.

aside from all of the wishlisting, i just want to again say i'm having an absolute blast with this.

Vadym @YellowAfterlife7/18/2023, 10:43 AM

Support for multiple windows is now in!

tea @sadteaparty7/19/2023, 1:41 AM

this is extremely cool! i can easily see myself setting up a separate browser profile just to easily repopulate everything after reboots and such

edit: oh wow i just better realized how you've implemented the viewport/cropping, so that it actually secretly expands the size of the 'window' in order to continue to fill the column. how clean!

Damien @eramdam7/13/2023, 7:57 PM

Shame it's Windows-only (but it makes sense because WindowsForm). Almost makes me want to replicate this using Electron but I probably shouldn't dig that rabbit hole lol

Vadym @YellowAfterlife7/13/2023, 9:11 PM

It's more about SetParent than WinForms - where Windows says "of course you can embed this application into a completely unrelated process", Mac/Linux's response would be "you're going to jail" and you'd have to fall back to something silly like rendering a background window into a bitmap and then rendering that bitmap.

I think you can do this with Electron - I checked and it appeared to allow multiple "views" inside one window using BrowserWindow.addBrowserView, but then you'll need to re-create some other elements of a browser or base this on some open-source Chromium project.

Damien @eramdam7/13/2023, 9:41 PM

Yeah I might fuck around and see how hard it would be to do.

Jam @JamChimera7/15/2023, 5:00 AM

yooo fuck yeah i was trying to do exactly this with multiple browser windows this looks much better

Hyazinthe @corposant7/31/2023, 6:42 AM

oh this rules. Kind of reminds me of the chat clients you used to get back in the day so you could be logged in to AIM, MSN Messenger, and Skype in the same window

Vadym @YellowAfterlife8/2/2023, 3:09 PM

Thank you! Thinking about Pidgin time to time...

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