buzzbird

Version 0.7 of Buzzbird is now available!

Originally I had planned on holding off until I had a chance to finish implementing lists. As it stands, lists are currently half-implemented in the back-end code, but I’ve disabled it from being usable in the UI. Unfortunately, recent changes to the Twitter API were causing version 0.6 to have “401 Unauthorized” errors when attempting to login. Obviously, having a working application is more important than squeezing one more feature in.

So here’s what’s new in Version 0.7:

• No more 401 errors.
• Notifications! You can now configure Buzzbird to notify you when mentions, DMs, or plain old tweets come in.  On Mac, the Growl framework is used.  On Linux, I’m using the notify-send utility that comes with libnotify.  Windows doesn’t really have a de-facto notification system, so I’m using the Mozilla notification system that comes with XULrunner on that platform.
• Issue 41: The Post button is now disabled when it should be.
• Issue 40: Implemented a pooling mechanism for XMLHttpRequests so the app won’t get constipated when network timeouts happen.
• Issue 32: Don’t truncate retweets at 140 characters in the post window – let the user decide how to truncate.
• Issue 31: Auto-close the post area after posting (this behavior is configurable)
• Issue 30: Added keyboard shortcut for “Post” action (accel + return)
• Issue 29: Focus should be on post area when user clicks Post button.
• Issue 7: Press Return to Post is now configurable.

Get it while it’s hot!  Link

A lot of people are seeing 401 authentication errors w/ Buzzbird right now… I’m not sure what the source is just yet, and I apologize profusely for the inconvenience! It’s not currently happening with the latest code in master, so it must be either something that was fixed between version 0.6 and the latest version, or something different about my credentials than everyone else’s (which isn’t as crazy as it sounds … developers get whitelisted so that the API limits don’t apply to us, so it’s possible that there’s some difference in API limiting that is causing the problem).

I’ll keep y’all posted – and sorry again if this bug is affecting you!

UPDATE 5-APR-2010 1:34 UTC: I’ve reproduced the problem in v0.6, and it is indeed something that I’ve fixed in the latest code. Mulling over whether I should press on and try to get 0.7 released tomorrow, or try to back-port a fix to 0.6.

I’m still waiting to hear back from @twitterapi to confirm that I’ve identified the problem. Thanks again for your patience!

I recently added the notification pane to preferences, and while I was in there, I spiffed up the Accounts pane a bit. Just a few more bug fixes, and I hope to start putting another release together. Thanks for your patience – work has been pretty busy lately and I haven’t had as much time to devote to Buzzbird as I’d like!

New Notifications Preference Pane

New Accounts Preference Pane

I just got back from a family vacation in San Diego, so there hasn’t been a lot of progress lately. However, I now have notifications working on all three platforms. I may need to make some more tweaks to the Mac flavor, but right now DMs and mentions get sent to Growl (Mac), libnotify (Linux) or a built-in firefox native alert (Windows). The hardest part was downloading the avatars to send to the notification, but that’s working too.

It’s still not configurable, so obviously I need to do that before I can bake up a new release. Perhaps some time next week?

Tweet on.

I fixed a nagging bug last night w/ the friendship dialog. It turns out it was behaving differently based on whether you visited it from the “got to user” dialog, or if you clicked an avatar, or if you clicked a name. Fixed in master.

I also began experimenting with notifications on Mac. As always, I’m going to get it working on Mac first before I venture onto other platforms. Linux will likely be next. I might not even get to Windows before the next release. I’m not sure how I’m going to do Windows notifications yet… I’ll probably require WIndows users to install Growl, which is kind of a drag, but I can’t come up with a more “native” way to do it just yet. For all three OSes, I basically need a way to send a pop-up “toaster” notification from the command line.

Anyway – back to the salt mines! Tweet on…

…here’s what I’ve been up to lately:

Let me start by saying that, when I began writing Buzzbird, I did not know Javascript. At all. And I barely knew any CSS. By trade, I was what you might call a “back end” guy. I’ve tended to write yucky stuff like “enterprise solutions” that run in “containers” with “highly scalable frameworks” and bla bla bla ick.

Since then, my career has taken a bit of a different tack. I’ve started doing more front-end web stuff. So in addition to futzing around with the Buzzbird project, I’ve been exposed to the work of a lot of top-notch Javascript geniuses and CSS cowboys.

Now, when I look at Buzzbird’s source code, I’m kinda embarrassed. Seriously, don’t look at it. It’s repulsive. If you saw it, you might even consider installing an AIR app instead of using Buzzbird (okay, I’m kidding, I guess it’s not THAT bad).

So right now I’ve started “refactoring” … I’ve started by making a clean API for the Twitter stuff. In the long term, this should make it easier to add support for identi.ca, tumblr, and other social services that support APIs that are similar to Twitter’s. Supporting additional services has always been a pie-in-the-sky goal for this project, and it won’t be possible until I clean house with the service code.

And working on this non-sexy drudgery means that I haven’t yet gotten a chance to work on cool frequently-requested features like Lists or Notifications. But it’s coming, I promise. Stay tuned.

Tweet on.

OK, so I watched the demo of Google Buzz (I’m still watching it, actually… they’re in the Q&A portion now). It looks interesting. I wonder if it’ll get the short-lived attention as Wave, or if it’ll actually stick. Time will tell.

My biggest problem is that I have to consider changing the name of Buzzbird again. If you’ve been following Buzzbird for a while, you know that this project has already changed its name once. The application was originally called Bluebird, but that name conflicted with another project. This project has nothing to do with Google Buzz – will the name “Buzzbird” confuse people?

Probably not. Probably Buzzbird can keep its name. I just wish Google had picked a different term.

Last night I launched a spankin’ new version of Buzzbird’s homepage.  The old one was a pair of static pages that I threw together, with a handful of links to the github wikis and a free WordPress hosted blog.  I decided that Buzzbird really deserved something better, so I went all out and made a new self-hosted WordPress site for it.

The old site wasn’t “lively” enough; it looked dead and unloved.  You couldn’t tell if anyone had done anything with Buzzbird in the past few months.  So I’m hoping to blog more often (even if it’s just a few quick sentences) to keep breathing life into it.  The Twitter widget on the front page shows what people are saying about Buzzbird right now.  Hopefully it’s mostly positive – it’s an unfiltered live search. 

See you all on Twitter!

This is the version you take home to meet Mom and Dad.  This is the version you bring to the prom.  This is the version you keep a photo of in your wallet to show to your friends.

I finally got tired of going into online forums and reading stuff like this:

…and I decided it was high time I do something about it.  So this version is a bit prettier than the last.  You’ll find a few new goodies in the latest version:

• Support for “Official” Re-tweets.  You can choose whether you want to use Twitter’s new auto-retweet feature, or stick with the tried-and-true manual retweet.
• Fixed Issue #24 – Changing active user after follow/unfollow.
• Fixed Issue #23 (Maybe) – Occasional disappearing cursor in the post dialog (this is a XUL bug, but I found a workaround that might help).
• Fixed Issue #19 – Remove Friendship button from friendship dialog, which caused a recursive black-hole vortex that accidentally bended space-time.
• Fixed Issue #11 – The “@kermit does not follow @misspiggy” text was wrong on the friendship dialog.

Get it now at http://getbuzzbird.com!

A lot of people have been saying they’d like to see notifications in the next version.  I was planning on doing lists first, but perhaps notifications is a bigger need?

I’m also working on a new Buzzbird website that should be ready sometime this week.  Stay tuned!

Now that I have friendship/following dialogs out of the way, I feel like I can finally focus on more interesting features.  I have a pile of ideas I’ve been sitting on, but I felt like I had to get past this milestone first.

Here’s the list of all the new features:

• You can now follow/unfollow any user from within Buzzbird – you are no longer sent to Twitter’s web page to do it. A new per-user dialog was added to facilitate this.
• (OSX only) You can now assign Buzzbird to a specific Space, or to all Spaces (this one is for you, Troy).
• Threaded replies now work.
• Buzzbird can now put the number of unread messages, unread mentions, or unread DMs in the titlebar.
• You can now choose to put your friends’ “real names” in bold (instead of their handles) when rendering.
• Clicking a hashtag can bring you to either search.twitter.com or hashtags.org (used to be only hashtags.org, now it’s configurable)
• Fixed some bugs which would cause Tweets to not be rendered if URLs within the tweets contained special characters.
• Failure to post a tweet because of network issues will no longer cause the text of your tweet to be erased.
• Upgraded xulrunner to 1.9.1.4 (which gives Buzzbird parity w/ Firefox 3.5.4).

Coming up next, I plan on adding support for Lists and official Retweets, and maybe a few other goodies.  As with every other release I’ve done, I intend to have a lot less time between releases for the next go-round, but despite my best intentions, that never seems to happen.  Let’s hope this time it actually happens!

Make sure you visit the site to get the latest version:  http://getbuzzbird.com