Version 0.5.001 released

With twhirl version 0.5.001, a very annoying bug has been fixed, and some new features and changes have been introduced. Let me give you a short overview.

Tweet text scrolling bug fixed

You may have noticed that when you scrolled through your timeline with your mouse wheel, on some tweets the first line seemed to be cut off. twhirl accidentally scrolled down the tweet text to an empty line at the bottom, which made the first line disappear. This has been fixed in version 0.5.001.

Context menu on tweet text

When you open a context menu over a tweet text, some new options have been added that allow quick access to replying, direct messaging, looking up or opening a users profile on twitter.com. If you do it somewhere over the text, the commands work on the tweet’s sending user. But, if you point your mouse over a @username in the tweet and open the context menu, that user will be used.

You can now easily add other user references to your own tweets, even if they did not write to you. Consider you get a tweet that is a reply to someone else. If you want to reply to the sender, but also include a reference to the person her replied to, you had to copy/paste (or manually write) that username to your input area. Now, simply point over the @username, open context menu (normally, a right-click) and select “> reply” to add that reference at your current cursor position.

Also, by selecting “> direct msg” you can start writing a direct message to that person (it will replace text in the input area). By clicking “> lookup profile”, twhirl will go to its profile lookup panel and fetch information for that user. Finally, “> open in browser” will direct your web browser to the person’s profile on twitter.com.

Custom format for retweets

Version 0.4.004 added a quickbutton to resend a tweet you received, by prefixing it with “Retweet:” and adding the tweet’s text. Many users requested to add a reference to the original sender, but everyone had different ideas how this should be done. In twhirl 0.5.001, you are free to define your own format that twhirl uses to build retweets.

If you open the configuration for an account, you find an input field with a drop-down list to enter your custom format string. The list contains some predefined strings you can use, but feel free to edit it to your need. There are two placeholders you can include in your format string that twhirl will replace when it builds a retweet text.

• %s is replaced by a reference to the original sender
• %t is replaced by the original tweet text

All other characters are used literally in the resulting text.

For example, if you want to retweet “twhirl is cool” received from user foo, the format string

%t [via %s]

would produce a retweet text like

twhirl is cool [via @foo]

No more hard-limit of 140 characters for tweet input

Earlier versions of twhirl limited the length of text you could enter in the input are to 140 character (which is the limit twitter has for tweets). While this avoided writing and sending too long texts, it made it sometimes difficult to edit text before sending it.

Now, the limit is gone, but twhirl recognizes when you exceed the 140 charcters. The background color of the input area turns light-red, and “over-characters” are displayed in gray. In addition, the character counter turns negative, indicating how much you are over the limit.

Sender’s real name is back

Since version 0.5.000, a tweet sender’s user name was displayed inline with the text and no longer in the meta info below (you could change that in options). One disadvantage this introduced was that the sender’s real name was no longer displayed.

In version 0.5.001, this has been changed, and the real name is always part of the meta info.

Get twhirl

If you want to install or update twhirl, please go to the twhirl website. You’ll also find more information there.