Category: tweet

Posted on

Shiny

Tweet!

courtesy of Ulisse Perusin, Tweet now has a rocking icon.

since 0.2 has been released, I’ve also added:

  • a status icon to show error messages and the number of new statuses inside a tooltip; when clicking on it, it will bring up the Tweet window and, more importantly, it will disappear until the next update.
  • key navigation, which required a new release of Clutter-GTK
  • better word wrapping and dimensioning of the cells in the ListView
  • open up the browser when clicking on the user’s icon in the status information overlay

there are still features I’d like to work on before 0.4.0, but all in all current HEAD of master looks fairly stable and useful. if everything goes according to plan, I’ll spin 0.4.0 before GUADEC, and 0.6.0 after I port Tweet to the new shiny Clutter 0.8 API.

Posted on

Finally Woken

the first, alpha quality release of Tweet is available here.

Tweet 0.2.0

I’d like to stress out that this is an alpha quality release; I’ve been using it for a while, now, and nothing serious like the destruction of my hard drive happened but I cannot guarantee that it won’t happen to you. you’ve been warned.

from the new-and-shiny department:

  • use NetworkManager to detect a connection change
  • scroll wheel support
  • nice gradients on the speech bubble
  • more readable datetime stamps on each status
  • update the status view with just the new statuses instead of reloading everything

from the stuff-still-missing department:

  • an icon — can I have an icon? please, pretty please with sugar on top?
  • follow/unfollow users
  • direct messages
  • show a particular user
  • show followers and following
  • add a control to open a browser on the current status
  • show error messages instead of silently failing

and finally, from the would-be-nice department:

  • use Gypsy to update the location
  • exporting the status archive

if you want to give a hand, just clone the repository:

  git clone git://github.com/ebassi/tweet.git

and hack away! :-)

Posted on

Pogo Stick

apparently, some people — and I’m looking at you, Pippin — said that the Tweet repository is hard to find: you actually have to search in my blog.

well, not anymore: Tweet on GNOME Live

complete with a screenshot of the new UI, as suggested by Matthew Allum:

Tweet - Pogo style
Posted on

Road to Somewhere

well, after eating my dog food for a while, it seems that Tweet is starting to get more useful.

first of all, now Tweet has an authentication dialog which allows you to enter your username and password the first time you run it:

Authentication/1

and even verify them beforehand:

Authentication/2
Authentication/3

then you get the list of statuses from the people you’re following:

Loading

you can scroll around using your mouse, and tap a row to get more informations about the status and the user:

Navigation

click on the screenshot…

as you can see, the UI is geared towards the touchscreen usage, but I plan to add key navigation soon.

still, there’s a lot to add: support for viewing your own statuses, direct messages, the list of people you’re following and the people following you — even the error messages are just printed to the console, even though I’m working on that.

the bits I’m most proud of:

  • the GTK+ integration: I’m retrieving the style information straight from the GtkWindow embedding the Clutter stage, and even if I had to fight with the utter mess that is the themeing code, I was able to gather enough to make Clutter play nice with a GTK+ environment ((in the screencast the scrollbar handle color, for instance, comes from the theme as well as the font));
  • the small animation API I implemented on top of the Clutter animation framework, requiring a single function (plus two completely generic classes) to tween an actor between two states; for instance: 
    tweet_actor_animate (info, TWEET_LINEAR, 250,
                     "y", tweet_interval_new (G_TYPE_INT, y + padding, 100 + padding),
                     "height", tweet_interval_new (G_TYPE_INT, 10, (height - (100 * 2))),
                     "opacity", tweet_interval_new (G_TYPE_UCHAR, 0, 196),
                     NULL);

    this is the code that animates the status information actor that appears overlayed on top of the status view ((this kind of utility API is easy to achieve given the power and flexibility of the underlying framework — but it obviously limits what you can and cannot do, and if you ty to coerce it into being more generic you start losing bits and pieces and a simple API starts getting in your way instead of helping you; that’s why Clutter‘s animation framework might seem complicated at first: it’s trying very hard to allow you to build whatever animation you have in mind instead of limiting you)); I’d like to thank pippin for the idea about the API behaviour;

  • Twitter-GLib, the generic API for accessing Twitter throught its RESTful API, which thanks to LibSoup has been a breeze to write even in a clunky and not-at-all-web-two-point-oh-buzzword-compliant language like C;
  • the fact that Tweet is written in a very reusable manner (apart from the base scrollable list which comes from Tidy), with every piece neatly abstracted into its own class.
  • finally, the fact that after almost a year of basically working on libraries only I can still sit down and get an application from scratch to a usable state in a couple of weeks in my spare time — even if I have to write a library to get it done. :-)

by the way: is any artist out there interested in making an icon for Tweet? I really would like to avoid using Twitter’s own icon.