Going multilingual - twhirl 0.6 released

It has been quite a while since the last release, but this one took more time then usual. Besides improving twhirl’s functionality, the new version also introduces something especially interesting for non-English speaking users: localization. You can now switch the interface language at runtime. Besides English, version 0.6 includes German, Spanish and Italian.

And while many memory leaks haven’t been fixed in Adobe AIR, the new twhirl release has been reworked to use (and leak) less memory than before. User profiles are now cached to save requests, and notification windows can be enqueued and shown one after another.

Attention: This new release will reset your color scheme selection to the default scheme. The way previous versions stored your color scheme preferences didn’t work reliably when twhirl was updated, so it had to be changed. With this update, setting it back to default is intended. But hopefully, for the last time…

Localization

twhirl’s user base has grown over the last months, and many of its users don’t speak English as their native language. To make using twhirl easier for everyone, it now supports localization of its user interface. Simply open the accounts manager (click on the top-left twhirl logo in any twitter window), go to the “Language” tab, select your preferred language from the drop-down list, and click on “change language”. That’s it, all buttons, labels, menus etc. will now be displayed in the selected language.

For now, twhirl supports four languages: English, German, Italian and Spanish. New languages will be added in future releases. If you want to help to translate twhirl to your language, feel free to contact me at info@twhirl.org.

Note: twhirl support is only available in English and German. Italian and Spanish translations have been provided by twhirl users (thx, @Giovy and @banyuken).

Cached user profiles

If you configure twhirl to lookup user profile in the application, each click on a @username resulted in two requests sent to the Twitter API. While this is comfortable and fast, it can lead to your account exceeding the limit if you use it too often.

While twhirl cannot change the general problem, it can help you to avoid unnecessary lookups. If it receives info about a user (profile info and user’s tweets), it caches them internally and displays the cached data if you lookup the profile again. If you want twhirl to update the data from Twitter, you can click the “refresh” button.

To go back to a previously entered or clicked username, select it from the drop-down list on lookup panel and press Return.

Notifications, the next generation

When twhirl received more than 3 new tweets (or direct messages) per request, it displayed a single notification window that only displayed the number of received items. Many users requested that twhirl should show all new tweets it receives individually, and not provide a summary.

The new version allows this (but it’s not the default): you can un-select “show summary for more than 3 tweets” in options. But this can lead to other problems. If you disable summaries and startup twhirl, it can display up to 60 (sixty!) notification windows per account (20 tweets, 20 replies, 20 direct messages). And then multiply this by the number of configured accounts…

To deal with this, another addition has been made to the notifications. In options, you can now tell twhirl to enqueue notifications. It will then display notifications one after another, oldest first, newest last. So if you want to see all new tweets or direct messages twhirl receives, the combination of disabling “show summary…” and enabling “enqueue notifications” might work best for you.

Network status indicator

You might notice a little circle at the bottom right of twitter windows in version 0.6, that is gray first, and then shows colors from red to yellow to green. This is a new network status indicator that gives a visual hint how reliable twhirl was able to contact the Twitter servers. It shows you how many of the last 10 requests were okay, and how many failed. Green means everything is fine, yellow indicates that some requests failed, and if the it turns to red, no more than 30% of the requests were successful.

The indicator only counts requests as failed if they had problems on the network level. If Twitter responded to a request, it is considered to be successful, even if Twitter itself returned an error (maybe because you tried to request something you are not allowed to see).

Toggle filtering

Version 0.5.002 introduced filtering support for the timeline, which got very positive feedback from users. In the new version, a behavior has changed: filtering is only active when the filter panel is open. If you close it, the filter is disabled and all tweets are shown. If you open the filter panel again, the filter will be enabled (it wasn’t deleted) and only matching tweets show up in the timeline.

Memory usage

Many hours of development have been used to rework large parts of twhirl to reduce memory consumption. Version 0.6 should now be less memory intensive, especially if you run it for a longer time. When starting up, twhirl uses about 40-50MB of memory (yes, AIR apps are quite large…), but even after many hours and thousands of tweets received, it should stay around 70-90, and most of the additional memory is used to cache avatar images.

Getting twhirl

You can get the latest version from the twhirl homepage. To update your currently installed version, go to accounts manager, open “Update” tab and click on “Check for update”.