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.