A widget for everyone’s favourite little social gem, Twitter.
- Read your friend’s most recent tweets from Mac OSX’s Dashboard
- Post status updates right in the widget
Fixes and additions in Twitgit 0.8
- Security Fix: Twitgit no-longer uses the
eval()function to parse JSON from Twitter, instead uses a proper JSON parser. Yes, Twitgit was first written in less experienced times. Thanks to Thomas Roessler for reporting this. - 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 established convention
- Twitgit no-longer automatically refreshes tweets, this was infuriating a memory leak. To refresh, just show and hide the Dashboard.
Fixes and additions in Twitgit 0.7
- New scrolling status view.
- The ‘Refreshing Twitterings’ text is gone, with network activity now indicated by the Twitter ‘t’ glowing gold.
- The widget is 100px shorter, and no more widget height jiggling!
- Message length is now properly capped, so you won’t get truncated by Twitter.
- Fixed a bug that truncated messages containing ‘&’ characters.
- Twitgit now has an icon of its own, rather than the default OSX widget icon.
- Usernames can now be clicked to take you to profile pages
- URLs within messages are now click‑able, and truncated cleanly as on the Twitter website
Known Issues
- Error handling is, frankly, patchy. If you type your password wrong you may or not get informed of the error. If Twitgit hangs, try re-entering your credentials on the back of the widget.
- Twitter’s JSON feed doesn’t always return a full complement of tweets. This can result in the display of tweets dramatically varying in length. Local caching will be added in a future release.
History
The reason for developing Twitgit is that I find Twitter’s Jabber integration too obtrusive. It’s cool, very slick and very easy to use but it distracts me far too much at work. A Dashboard widget works perfectly in the background, though, so it puts me in control. I can check Twitter at my leisure, without being disturbed by it. I also use an excellent utility for OSX called Dasher; a tool to automatically pull in Dashboard after a specified period if inactivity — like a screensaver. So for me, I’ll come back to my machine with a cup of tea and Twitgit will be sitting open and up to date. I can glance at it to read the latest twitterings, perhaps post quickly, then pop back to work with no further disturbance.
Please, make any feature requests in the comments.
Ben is a 24 year old Web Developer from Cambridge and is a computing graduate of the University of Manchester.