Mike-Ward.Net

Tweetz 2.0 – Beta 2

Some quick fixes.

• Character encoding fixed. Diacriticals should post correctly now.
• Changed header font
• Added a border around the gadget

I need to know if the new tweet notification workflow is working for you. The intended behavior is to display the “new tweets” notice. It should not scroll to the top when the notification displays. Clicking the “x new tweets” notification scrolls to the top and displays the new tweets. I’ve checked this several ways and believe it’s working. If it’s not working for you or you think it should function differently, let me know.

Rounded borders. I’m not holding out too much hope for this one. Inserting a background image with transparency kills the performance of the application. It’s something you have to see to believe. The gadget literally gets twice as slow scrolling. I can only surmise that it’s a bug in the sidebar code. Lots of gadgets don’t scroll so it’s not an issue but tweetz’s performance in this area is important.

I’m still not satisfied with the long term performance of the gadget. Performance still degrades over time albeit more slowly. The issue is the DOM. The larger it gets, the slower it goes. I’m thinking of rendering only the top 25 tweets on a refresh with a “more” link to continue. All the received tweets are in the memory model so updates for additional content will be fast.

Couple of quick tips: Ctrl+S will bring up the message window when the gadget has the input focus. Ctrl+S will send a new tweet. Ctrl+K will shorten links. If you hover over the message window buttons, you’ll get tooltips showing the keyboard shortcuts.

That’s all for now. Available on the downloads page.