Twitgit 0.8

Once upon a time I wrote a dashboard widget called Twitgit. It lets you interact with Twitter from the Mac OSX Dashboard.

In the face of stiff competition from the Icon Factory’s magnificent Twitterific application, Twitgit has been rather neglected for over a year now. It’s hard to motivate yourself to write software that you don’t actually use.

One year and ten days since Twitgit 0.7 (it was released January 7th 2007), I’ve updated Twitgit again. A very kind gentleman named Thomas Roessler emailed me in December, having inspected my inexperienced and shoddy source code. He rightly pointed out that using the JavaScript eval() function to parse JSON was a really bad idea; especially in a widget running with local system privileges. I should, of course, have been using a proper JSON parser. Twitgit 0.8 is fixed and uses the JavaScript JSON parser from JSON.org and makes no more calls to eval(). Since I was writing an update, I’ve tidied up the functionality and added some new features too. Of course, because of this security fix (albeit conceptual and unexploited), Twitgit 0.8 is a vital update for anyone using it.

Download Twitgit 0.8

Since I was working on the code again — with some affection, I might add — I’ve added some other fixes and new features, too.

• Restored relative ‘5 minutes ago…’ timestamps as they were removed from the Twitter API.
• Added user icons to tweet display
• Added automatic creation of links to users referenced with ‘@username’
• Swapped the tweet input for a slimline text input box, and the chunky ‘Twitter’ button is gone for something more discrete, too.
• Changed the tweet length limit to 140 characters, as per Twitter’s now well established convention

So, for those of you who prefer Twitter in Dashboard than on the desktop, I hope Twitgit remains useful to you. Having been working with the code again, I have a few more fixes planned for the near future. I hope they’ll materialise.