twhirl's blog

twhirl 0.8.4 adds identi.ca support

mak — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 22:03:31 +0000

There has been a lot of change in the microblogging world lately, with quite a few new services showing up. One of those that gained a lot of attention is identi.ca, created by Evan Prodromou from Montreal. Although it lacks some of the core functionalities we are used to from other platforms, there’s something unique about it: it’s open in a lot of ways. We received quite a few requests to add support for identi.ca to twhirl, and since they released a twitter-compatible API just a few days ago, we gave it a try. It was surprisingly easy, and worked out of the box. Plus, we were able to use the XMPP support we originally added for twitter to get real-time updates of messages from your followings. And of course we will make it available for other services as well once they support it.

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twhirl 0.8.3 - a maintenance release

mak — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:26:16 +0000

While twitter is still struggling to get their service fully up and keep it running, they introduced some new glitches over the past days that also affected twhirl. First, their call to retrieve a user’s current rate limit status was completely changed and made twhirl’s built-in auto throttle non-functional. Second, an issue when posting a status update also lead to problems in twhirl.

Those things kept us busy over the last days, and while we don’t have new features to release yet, we are doing a maintenance release today to get the auto throttle back working and also handle posting problems better should they happen again.

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twhirl and the Twitter API rate limit

mak — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:00:59 +0000

One of the new features twhirl added lately was auto-throttling its request usage to the Twitter API based on the current limit they enforce. This was possible by requesting the number in action from their API, so we could adapt twhirl’s request schedule to it. This worked great, and we have received far less reports of users having issues with exceeding the limit since then.

But unfortunately, Twitter decided to change the behaviour of the request now, so the algorithm implemented in twhirl does no longer work correctly. It will likely send less requests than it could.

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twhirl 0.8.2 released

mak — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:02:19 +0000

Are you already waiting for a new release of twhirl? Well here it is! We took our time to make Friendfeed a lot more usable and add a few very nice features, including rooms support for Friendfeed, auto-throtteling for reduced Twitter API limits, hiding old Twitter messages from previous sessions, system status notifications and much more. And, finally, summize.com search!

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twhirl 0.8.1 released

mak — Wed, 07 May 2008 23:05:52 +0000

About two weeks ago, twhirl version 0.8 came out, introducing Friendfeed support and overhauling the UI for better navigation. We have received a lot of feedback about this version, and also some reports about problems some of you had with that version. We have fixed those issues, and are releasing a new version today.

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twhirl 0.8 released - adding friendfeed support

mak — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 23:49:09 +0000

Time for a new twhirl release! We already launched a preview version some days ago, but now it becomes official: version 0.8 allows you to connect to your friendfeed account from the same application you use to read from and post to Twitter. The user interface has been cleaned up a little bit, and various bugs have been fixed.

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Limit exceeded - what does it mean?

mak — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 11:11:16 +0000

Many users of twhirl seem to have problems to get updates from Twitter for some time now. twhirl reports that you have “exceeded your limit” and pauses updates for 5 minutes. For some, this problem only lasts for a couple of minutes, but others cannot get it to work for days.

While twhirl reports the error, it usually isn’t the culprit that caused this to happen. This blog article should give you some background information about the issue.

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twhirl 0.7.5 released

mak — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 23:31:35 +0000

This update wasn’t planned to get out so early, but a slight modification in Twitter’s API caused twhirl to no longer show avatars and usernames. To solve this issue, I packaged a new release (version 0.7.5) that corrects this.

In addition to this, a brand new service to shorten links is supported: tweetburner. It can do more than just making URLs short, as tracking statistics about how often links are clicked, and much more.

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twhirl 0.7.3 released

mak — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:06:35 +0000

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.

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Login issues - twhirl needs your help! SOLVED

mak — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 22:14:07 +0000

Since the release of twhirl version 0.7, some users seem to have problems logging in to twitter with twhirl, or the app stops fetching updates and reports errors. Most of the time, it works again after a relatively short period of time, but for some, the problems last longer. It looks like twhirl is unable to contact to twitter during this time.

This has been solved. Thanks!

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