Description

A cross-platform program designed to give the user desktop notifications when the status of specified TwitchTV channels change (eg. They start streaming, update their stream information, or stop streaming).

Features

• Efficiency:

  • Uses persistent http/https connections.
  • Has a cache for user avatars. Will download avatars as needed, and on subsequent runs, it will only re-download an avatar if it is modified (just like the refresh button does on a Web Browser).
  • The program spends the vast majority of its time sleeping, or waiting on IO, so it uses very little CPU time.

• Robustness:

  • It is designed to recover, by itself, from periods where the internet connection is lost.

Dependencies

• Versions:
  • Portable Windows Release: This version is put together with py2exe and should contain most dependencies. Try it first, and if it doesn't run then try installing the following:
    • The Microsoft Visual C++ runtime that the python lib was compiled with.
    • The GTK+ runtime
  • Standard Release: This is just the python code. Naturally this version is the easiest to alter. Requirements:
    • Python 2.7 (Note for Windows users: You will also have to add python to your path. The easiest method is to go to C:\Python27\lib\tools, double click on win_add2path.py, and restart)
    • NumPy
    • PIL
    • pyGtk
    • (Linux only, optional) pynotify (python-notify) or python-notify2

Set-up

Note: If you are cloning the repository, rather than downloading a release. You'll have to add a folder called cache along with a followedList.txt file.

Add the usernames of people which you want channel notifications for to followedList.txt, one per line. Note: You can have blank lines and comments can be created by prefixing a line with #. See example_followedList.txt.

Running

• Windows: Double-click run.bat

• Linux/Other: open a terminal emulator in the folder and run

python main.py

It checks TwitchTV immediately. It will tell you who is streaming at that moment, then it will check periodically for changes. Each notification will have a pop-up that stays up about 30 seconds (unless you close it earlier). It will also print it out in the command line window/terminal emulator with the time, so you won't miss notifications if they occur while you are away from the computer.

Note: I don't see why you might do it, but you shouldn't run two instances at once in the same directory. If you do, you could corrupt the avatar cache. Not a big deal as you would just have to clear the cache to fix it (see below), but still something to note.

Windows Note: If you use the standard command line, it does not fully support unicode and these characters may not show up properly in the window. However, they should still show up correctly in the actual notification.

Stopping

Just go to the command line/terminal emulator it is running in and press Ctrl+C. That will stop the program, and it will print out "Application Terminated". Then you can close the window. Note: Not doing Ctrl+C and just closing the window shouldn't cause any ill effects as it uses a database for persistent storage, but using Ctrl+C is still the suggested method.

Clearing the cache

Simply go to the cache folder and delete the contents. Do this if the cache is corrupted.

In theory, after there are plenty of users you stop following with it and/or lots of avatar changes, this could reclaim a little bit of disk space, but it shouldn't be significant.

Technical Notes

The program checks for status updates once every 5 minutes. You can of course decrease this delay by altering CYCLE_SLEEP_TIME in main.py. Testing showed that from the time someone starts streaming, TwitchTV takes about 2 minutes to update their status, so keep that in mind.