twhirl 0.7 released
It’s time for a new release, and some cool new features have been added to twhirl in version 0.7. You can now cross-post your updates to other services like Pownce and Jaiku, select your preferred Short-URL-service, received tweets can be marked as new, more color schemes have been contributed, and you can put the input box to the top.
When Adobe released the final versions of AIR 1.0 and the Flex 3 framework on February 25, I was right in the middle of preparing the next official version of twhirl, and it wasn’t ready to be released. So first, an intermediate version was made available (0.6.3), that did not introduce new features but was simply ready to run on systems that only had AIR 1.0 final installed. It gave me some more time to work on the next release, which is now available for download.
What’s new in version 0.7?
Probably the most important new feature is cross-posting. twhirl now enables you to update your status not only on twitter, but also on Pownce and Jaiku. You simply enter your credentials for these services, and twhirl will do the rest. More about this later.
twhirl originally used snurl to shorten URLs, which works fine most of the time. But over the past months, this service showed some instabilities, and I decided to allow you to select the Short-URL service you want to use. When you open the short-URL-dialog, you now can choose between snurl or is.gd. twhirl stores your selection (per account) and suggests it the next time you open the dialog. More services can be added in the future, if they provide an easy to use API.
A nice addition to twhirl’s user interface is marking received tweets as new. When twhirl fetches new tweets, replies or direct messages from the API, it marks them as new, or unseen, with a small dot at the top right. When you click somewhere inside a “new” tweet, the dot is removed. To mark all tweets as seen, simply click the new button below the timeline, or press the minus key (-). This should help tracking incoming tweets.
Beta versions of AIR did not allow me to do the next thing in previous twhirl releases, although it has been requested many times: mouse-over buttons for tweets should only show up when the pointer moves over the avatar, not the whole tweet. This has become possible now, as AIR 1.0 final fixed some things here.
And if you always wanted to have your input area at the top of the window: now you can. Simply activate the new option show tweet input at the top in configuration, on tab “Visual”. If it had been open while you changed this setting, simply close and re-open the input area once.
New color schemes have been contributed. While developing your own schemes is not an officially supported feature yet, some really nice themes were designed. twhirl 0.7 includes a selection of the best new themes.
Timeline filter configuration is now saved when you exit twhirl, and will be restored when you start it the next time. Also a bug has been fixed that prevented some avatar images from loading (when they contained special characters).
Remaining characters count now acts correctly when you write a direct message, not counting the “d username ” part.
Cross-posting in detail
I constantly get requests about posting status updates to other services like Pownce or Jaiku. When Pownce released a new version of their API that allows posting notes some days ago, I felt it was time to finally add this feature to twhirl.
In account’s configuration you can enable both services by selecting the check box and providing your credentials. twhirl will try to post to the services when you send a tweet to twitter, but only if you do not write a reply to someone (and of course, direct messages don’t get posted to other services). It will neither notify you about success nor about failure, it’s just handled silently in the background. And it will only cross-post to other services, if posting to Twitter was successful. Otherwise, you might end up posting duplicate messages to the secondary services if you try to send a failed tweet to twitter again.
To configure for Pownce, you have to provide your Pownce username and passwort. For Jaiku, you need your Jaiku username and your Jaiku API key, NOT your Jaiku password! You can get this API key here when logged-in.
Thanks
Credits for helping on some stuff in this release go to Sascha, who provided the new color schemes “Black Magic”, “Bordeaux” and “Petrol”. He also created the look of the “unseen” marker.
Also thanks to all the people who helped translating twhirl’s user interface to other languages!
Where to get it?
The new version is distributed using the embedded auto-updater. If you want to install it manually, go to twhirl’s homepage and follow the installation instructions.
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