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Yesterday I updated XBList to 3.2.1. This release is mostly bugfixes - it fixes a problem where Xbox Gamer Tiles wouldn’t load because xbox.com changed the format they stored pics in, and it fixes an issue where gamers who are away but in a game would show up as on the dashboard. The only new feature is that I’ve changed the sound that’s played when your friends come online. It’s now the same as the Xbox 360’s notification sound, and is much less jarring than the old sound. I hope that comes as a welcome change. Grab the new version and let me know what you think.

I read today that Xbox.com had gotten a redesign. I had hoped it wouldn’t impact the friends list page, which XBList uses to get its friend info, but unfortunately it had. The friends list is now split into 16-friend chunks. That meant I had some work ahead of me to make sure XBList could work with the new format. I’m pleased to announce that after only a few hours of work, XBList 3.2.0 has been released, which works just fine with the new site. I’m glad that all the refactoring work I had put into the software in the past allowed me to make a change like that without breaking anything. There is now the possibility of some slight weirdness if a friend changes status in the split-second between XBList loading one page and another, but I don’t think much can be done about that.

Of course, I couldn’t just make the fix and call it a new release. I’ve neglected XBList in the last year as I’ve been deep into work and other projects, but I’ve been accumulating little fixes, and as long as I had the code open today I added a much-asked-for feature: Halo 3 integration. OK, it’s not the best integration, but there are now menu items that link straight to your friends’ Halo 3 Service Record page, and better yet, Halo 3 emblems are now loaded in preference to the old Halo 2 emblems. If your friend has both, they’ll just get the Halo 3 emblem. I was amazed at how many people on my friends list (who hadn’t had Halo 2 emblems) popped up with Halo 3 insignia once I finished the feature. I hope this is enough to tide people over for a while.

I also improved the detection of Xbox.com outages. They seem to be better now, but around December the site was down all the time, and now XBList will be pretty clear about when it’s Xbox.com’s fault that you can’t log in. Hopefully that’ll reduce some confusion.

Please pick up XBList 3.2.0 and let me know what you think! The full changelog may be of some interest also.

I’ve been sitting on this one for a while, but it’s finally time to push it out the door. XBList 3.1 doesn’t have any revolutionary changes, but it’s got a lot of polish and nice little fixes and features that are sure to make life better for XBList users. The most noticeable new enhancements are that I’ve gotten XBList to use your system default font now (this means Vista users get the lovely Segoe UI font), and the popup notifications have been transformed from Windows 95-style to Windows Vista style.

I also added a lot of little features people have been asking for. There are now options for XBList to be on top of all windows, to start up with Windows, and to start minimized. You can compose a new message to your friend by just double clicking their name. I’ve also fixed a bug where two people who share a computer couldn’t both run their own copies XBList.

This release also includes some nice features for Vista users. First, it includes a manifest, so there will be less compatibility warnings and such. Next, it’ll offer to fix your Internet Settings automatically so that signing in under Vista is smoother. I’ve also built a completely new installer using WiX, which is prettier, smaller, and more functional.

I encourage anyone who’s interested to look at the changelog for the full list of updates. One thing you might notice is that I’ve added some backend support for making a Windows Sidebar Gadget that displays your friends list. I can’t promise I’ll get around to it (I’ve had bad experiences with Gadgets before), but it’s nice to know the capability is there.

I really thought that by now I’d be announcing that XBList is totally obsolete, for two reasons. The first is Games For Windows - LIVE, which aims to bring the Xbox Live experience to PC games. I tried out the beta, and while it’s neat, there’s no indication Microsoft is coming out with an XBList-style application for the Windows desktop that’ll show you your friends. The second reason was the new Windows Messenger integration in the Spring Dashboard Update. I love this, but half my friends aren’t on Windows Messenger anyway, and I can’t see people’s Xbox status from Adium, Trillian, or Meebo, so I’ll keep using XBList to know who’s ready to play some Halo 3 (beta). I hope everyone else continues to find it useful as well.

Last night I hammered out a quick Greasemonkey script (poetically called “No Xbox Live Arcade Demos”) to solve one of my pet peeves in the otherwise awesome Xbox.com website. The problem is that while you can check out the list of games you’ve played, and all your achievements in them, it will also include Xbox Live Arcade demos that you’ve played but not purchased. Since you haven’t purchased them, you can’t earn achievements or gamerscore, so it’s kind of useless to have them in the list. All my script does is go and look for games with “0 of 200″ points - indicating an Arcade game you haven’t played (or a new one, which is a problem but unfortunately that seems to be the best way to find them). As a bonus, the script also removes these games from your “total games” count, and removes their score from your total possible gamerscore. The total gamerscore thing in particular annoyed me, since you’d have to buy every demo to realize that “potential”. The script also works on the “Compare Achievements” page, removing any Arcade games that neither you nor your friend have played from the list. I hope everybody enjoys this!

Well, I’ve finally gotten around to releasing a version of XBList that’s good enough to call 3.0. Last year I posted a look at what I thought should be in the next XBList. The most major has been the transition to .NET 2.0. Besides the increased stability and power of the new framework and doing things “the 2.0 way”, I ended up rewriting most of XBList’s innards in an effort to make it more maintainable, cleaner, faster, and more stable. That’s all in there, even though you don’t see it. Emblem loading, in particular, is much more robust. I also went out of my way to simplify the app and put in those little features that had been bugging me forever. For example, XBList now remembers if you’ve collapsed a category (like “Offline”) instead of expanding it each time. And a list refresh won’t always scroll to the top like it used to.

However, there are a couple of very visible changes. First, you’ll now get a little tray icon and message bubble whenever there are new messages waiting for you at Xbox.com. This is really exciting for me, since it means that friends can invite you to a game and you’ll know about it right there on your desktop. It’s a new feature, and I’ll be working on it more, but I hope everybody likes it. The other thing is that XBList has a new icon and a new set of graphics. There’s an animated sign-in screen, a chilling error screen, and better indicators in the system tray. I never liked the old XBList icon (which was just the old Xbox logo, cut out), and this one feels much more professional, as well as having its own identity, which isn’t to say that it doesn’t owe a lot to the Xbox 360 UI team.

One last thing: I never got a chance to try it, but people complained that XBList 2.2 didn’t work on Vista. I think XBList 3.0 might (and I created a spiffy Vista icon for it) so please give it a shot and let me know if it works!