I like Twitux, but it bugged me so much that I get notifications saying 3 new tweets and not what the tweets ARE that I spent a few minutes last night patching it. I would attach this to the bug tracker but it doesn’t seem to have one. The only obvious problem with the patch is that it displays tweets in the order they appear in the XML, which is usually newest to oldest within one set of updates, so if your friends are having a conversation it may appear backwards within one update. I didn’t think this was enough of a problem to fix it for what I wanted.
Any other recommendations for good Twitter clients, btw? Is Twitux even maintained any more?
[and don’t get me onto the subject of how relieved I was to delete code saying _("You have %i new %s.")…]
Just curious, why is _(“You have %i new %s.”) considered bad coding?
Is it because they are passing “tweet(s)” as a string, rather than doing some fancy gettext pluralization stuff?
@jpl:
Partly that, but it has knock-on effects. In English we don’t usually mark for plurals on adjectives, but there are very many languages which do. Consider how this should look in French:
Vous avez 1 tweet nouveau.
Vous avez 2 tweets nouveaux.
It’s impossible to produce this result from _(“You have %i new %s.”).
You could check out gwibber (https://launchpad.net/gwibber), it supports twitter and many other micro-bloggy sites.
I really like TwitterFox, which sits in the lower right of your Firefox window.
I just use pidgin, like I do for everything else.
Good point. I see that you removed the entire line of code altogether. But, I’m curious, how *would* you program the English phrase “You have X new tweet(s)” correctly (using gettext)?
Or is it that you avoid this sentence construction?
@jpl:
Well, mostly people do this by writing two separate strings:
“You have 1 new tweet.”
“You have %d new tweets.”
This works in far more languages, but not all: for example, in Welsh you would actually need to switch on more forms than just that for the number 1, since it would go something like
Mae 1 tweet newydd ‘da chi.
Mae 2 dweet newydd ‘da chi.
Mae 3 thweet newydd ‘da chi.
Mae 4 tweet newydd ‘da chi.
Mae 5 tweet newydd ‘da chi.
Mae 6 thweet newydd ‘da chi.
…
The real fix is to use nplurals, which is designed to deal with this sort of thing. But if even that’s not enough, I hear KDE are experimenting with allowing inline JavaScript in the translation…
I myself have been messing with the code for twitux. I would like to make a new icon for sure the weird looking dragon is not my favorite. Also when you open it the font underneath who and when is so small it makes it hard to read was gonna mess with that as well. Gwibber is nice but i had some problems with it not updating for some reason so went back to twitux.
I use twitterific on my iMac/MacBook/iTouch and twibble on my mobile. That’s not entirely helpful to you since the closest they come to running on *nix is running on a Mac – but have you seen twirssi?
You can report bugs here: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=198704
Gwibber is good for a stand-alone app. Twitterfox works for Firefox, but I’m not 100% happy with it. Or the gnome-do Microblogging plugin (formerly Twitter plugin) uses notifications to let you know about new tweets (but doesn’t keep track of them afterwards).
Gwibber is your best bet and they have really active development right now. It was started by Ryan Paul of Ars Technica.
I was the last person to update Twitux’s wiki page on GNOME Live, and so a lot of people seem to think I’m somehow responsible for it and send me emails requesting fixes.
Many of them are things I’d like myself, I must admit. It’s a promising app but not quite there.
Project is still alive, though activity is pretty slow since Daniel has been AWOL due to work, and I’ve been fairly busy due to my work with Fedora/OLPC.
I’ve gone ahead and applied your patch. Thanks!
btw, if someone want ot work on an icon for twitux, it would be most appreciated.