Mike-Ward.Net

Tweetz 3.0 - Beta 2

The feedback has been very good from Beta 1. So far, most of you appreciate the “lighter” footprint and the “All” timeline. The text menu is not well liked.

OK, most of the reason we don’t have icons in the tab bar is because I’m not a graphic artist and I have zero interest in it. That said, I’ve replaced the text tabs with icons from the twitter set currently installed in the gadget. Here’s the new look:

Yeah, they’re a little cheesy but they get the job done. Eespecially in docked mode, which is how I primarily use the gadget. Again, if anyone wants to help me out here…

I’ve moved the status indicator (the green dot) to the far right of the title area. Red means a communications error, green means you’re OK. It pulses to indicate that the gadget is checking for status updates.

I’ve removed all the line breaks in the “info” portion of the tweets (timestamp, via, etc.). This should allow for a few more lines of tweets to appear in the gadget. I’m still seeing one unexpected line break in retweets (“Retweeted by” always line breaks). Have not figured out why this is.

Another request I plan on getting to are “more” links. Just a matter of coding them up.

There are couple of keyboard shortcuts that are useful.

Ctrl+S – brings up the What’s happening dialog. Ctrl+S after composing posts the new status.

Ctrl+C – Highlight a tweet, press Ctrl+C and it will copy the contents of the tweet to the clipboard.

Ctrl+D – Dumps the gadget’s markup to a browser window. Should be useful for styling the gadget.

I’ll be adding a help page to document these and other features.

There seems to be some push back on font sizes. I’m surprised since going smaller renders the font almost unreadable. What’s the feeling here?

I haven’t heard any questions about the red divider bar below the tabs when the gadget is scrolled. I’m assuming the meaning is self evident. I’m curious what others think it means.

Another tip: Use a mouse program like WizMouse. This program allows the program under the mouse scroll using the mouse wheel without having to change the focus first (click on the window). It works perfect with tweetz and makes using the gadget much more friendly.

That’s all for this week. Tweetz is available on the downloads page.