Mike-Ward.Net

Tweetz 3.1–Beta 1

It’s a new year and Tweetz 3.1 is feature complete. So what just what are those features you ask? Well, here they are:

Localization – Tweetz in now available in a dozen languages. (English, French, Greek, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, Swedish and Turkish). Thanks to everyone who supplied translations. Of course, I’ve made some last minute changes so you’ll see a few phrases are not localized. Send me the updates for these and I’ll add them. Additional languages come from you, the users. Just edit the “locale.js” file in the gadget folder and send it to me and I’ll include it in future releases.

Themes – Tweetz now has 3 different themes. Two look similar except for layout of the tweets themselves. You change themes by pressing Ctrl+Q. Thanks, to some excellent feedback, each theme is in a single .css file. (Original, 02 and White). If you’re so inclined, modify the theme of your choice and send it to me.

Unread Tweet Indicator – There’s a small orange bullet that appears at the bottom of tweets. This indicates tweets that have arrived (after the initial startup). You can mark the tweet as “read” by passing your mouse over the tweet.

New Icons – I’ve replaced the old tab bar icons with icons from the Silk icon set. They look better in the docked mode since they’re not scaled and work with multiple themes.

New Action Menu – The old menu to reply/retweet/etc. was all icons. The new menu is a more traditional pop-up menu and as more features. The old paradigm just wasn’t cutting it.

New Actions – The new menu has a some new actions.

• Reply to All – allows you to reply to all user’s mentioned in a tweet
• RT(>)… – for “old-style” retweets
• Retweet – for new style retweets (this use be option)
• Delete – only for tweets you author
• Unfavorite – remove a tweet from you’re favorites

Performance – I bought a book on high performance JavaScript and applied it’s lessons to tweetz over the holidays. I think if feels a bit faster but then I’m the guy who did the performance work so I’m naturally biased. I’ve also made numerous little layout tweaks including:

• The lock indicator has moved to the title bar
• There’s a 1/3 second delay on the action menu and links. This should cut down on unwanted popups when you’re just passing the mouse over the gadget or scrolling
• New tweets smoothly scroll-in/fade-in from the top
• Other layout tweaks related to themes

Help – Last but not least, a help page. The gadget has links on the Login and Options panels that link to a web page with more information about the gadget. It’s a work in progress. Feedback is welcomed.

So you know the mission. Download it, (it installs side by side with older versions), run it, and report back to me with your bugs. Also, if you were using the Alpha, you can turn the update notifications on.

Available on the downloads page.