twhirl 0.7.3 released

The latest twhirl release, version 0.7.3, includes two remarkable new additions: TweetScan powered search and TwitPic image posting. While the first allows to use on of the best and fastest twitter search engines directly in twhirl, the second makes it easy to upload any image and include a URL pointing to it in your post. Besides that, keyboard support for scrolling lists has been improved, protected profiles are indicated, and cached user profiles expire after 60 minutes.

New Features

Here is a detailed description of the new and modified features in twhirl version 0.7.3

TweetScan search

While twhirl has supported searching public twitter posts by using the Terraminds service, it always had the drawback that their index was only updated every 15 minutes. And for some days now, the site is down and not responding to queries.

David Sterry from TweetScan was very helpful when I asked him if twhirl could use the service for searching, and within a day or so we had it all set up and working. Their index is updated in real-time, so every public tweet can be found immediately after it has been posted. You can now select which of the services you want to use (hopefully, Terraminds will be back soon!).

twhirl also keeps a history of your search queries. Open the drop down for the query field to get a list of previous used search terms.

TwitPic

If you have a picture you want to share with your followers, you had to upload it to a website, copy the URL and paste it into twhirl before. With the cool TwitPic service and their API, all this can now be done without leaving twhirl. Simply click the little camera button, select the image from your local computer, and post it to TwitPic. In return, twhirl will add the URL to the image to the input box, so you can add any text you like and post it to twitter.

If you have used TwitPic before, you will notice that pictures uploaded by twhirl don’t trigger an automatic status posting to twitter. For more information about the service, please visit their site.

Scrolling by Keys

The scrolling support for lists of tweets and users was quite basic in previous versions of twhirl. With version 0.7.3, all tweets and user lists now can be scrolled by using up and down arrow keys, home / end, and page up / page down. Please keep in mind that these keys will not work if any input field is focused.

Indicating Protected Profiles

It’s always good to know if a user has protected his updates, so you don’t accidentially re-tweet a tweet he/she wrote. To indicate that a user’s updates are not public, twhirl shows a little lock icon above its avatar.

User Profile Cache

twhirl caches user profiles you looked up to save requests to the twitter API. The drawback is that you might see outdated information when you lookup a cached user again.

Now, entries in the cache expire after sixty minutes, and twhirl will automatically refresh them when you access them after that period. It also tells you how old the cached data is if you access it within an hour.

Get twhirl

The new release will be pushed to existing users through the built-in auto update feature. If you have not used twhirl before, or want to manually install the new update, please visit twhirl’s website.