dwould | # 105 | 2009-12-18, 15:10 | Report

interesting ideas... I have a couple of questions...

Where do I get the icons?
how do I set the icons in gtkbuiblder?

how do I get the chars remaining counter *inside* the text entry box? I looked everywhere for info on that, and found nothing, which is why it is currently a label next to the entry box.

I'm actually playing at the moment with a ui which will hide everything except the tweets. And will bring them back if you type anything.
I am hoping to spend this evening investigating gestures, so that you can swipe left/right to switch views.
My plan is to bring the buttons etc back when you switch, then dissapear them again after a few seconds.
I'd love to make the buttons pretty pictures instead of text, but they are they way they are because that's all I've figured out so far.;-)

dwould | # 106 | 2009-12-18, 15:17 | Report

it stores things in a file in /home/user/.witter
so if it has no permission there then it won't store anything
I take it as a good point that I should investigate using GConf instead. don't suppose you can point me to a guide on doing that?
the password field for some reason auto-capitalises which sometimes catches people out thinking they've entered details correctly when they have not. I don't know why. I will probably switch to using one of the build it dialogs for obtaining credentials and hope is resolves that issue
they are base64 encoded in the .witter file.
annoyingly this seems to be something that textRenderer 'just handles' which rendering myself using cairo does not handle. so my current dev version no longer displays international chars. trying to figure out what to do about that.

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Last edited by dwould; 2009-12-18 at 15:24.

markusm | # 107 | 2009-12-18, 15:28 | Report

You get the icons from me (if you want) as I made them . I'm happy to help designing the graphics if you so wish. (I'm an Art Director / UI/UX designer by profession.)

I was going to suggest a disappearing UI as using Twitter is mostly reading stuff and less posting - at least usually I think this is the case.

You could just copy the layout concept from the Conversations view. Have a big "Tweet" button on top of the messages that scrolls away with the messages but as soon as the scrolling stops or the user taps the screen the button appears on top of the list again (fixed position). And I also think the writing of the new tweet could be done in a dialogue with only the text box and a button for sending. Clicking outside the dialogue cancels (but you could still remember the text that was written in case the user want's pick up where he/she left.

If you want I could try to do some mockups of different scenarios.

dwould | # 108 | 2009-12-18, 15:39 | Report

Well if you could send me a package of the icons then I can play with a few ideas.
I'm still loathe to ask people to spend too much time generating things, since I'm still not sure I know how to actually implement a given design. I'm very much bound by what I've figured out so far.

If I can figure out gestures, then that's a start.
I obviously need to figure out more event handling code to be able to detect scrolling and inactivity etc.
With christmas approaching, I'm not sure how much time I'll have to spend on it.

dwould | # 109 | 2009-12-20, 19:54 | Report

ok, so once again autobuilder is being painfully slow. however, witter 0.2.0-1 is on it's way to extras-devel.

no, there is still no support for avatars.

the buttons are still text, though I'm hoping the next drop will have icons.

also if you previously relied on non romanised chars being shown. don't update. as this isn't working at the moment.

so what have I spent my time doing?

there is now a custom cell renderer which makes things look a little nicer. but at the moment I'm using cairo to render text and haven't figured out how to make pango render non romanised glyphs, so no chinese/arabic or whatever. sorry.
but it does look nicer.

i've changed colours to match the colours of the other window buttons.

retweet not jus copies a tweet to the entry field so you can do 'old style' retweet.

reply_to put s focus in the entry field at the rightplace.

you can reply from the search view without losing our search terms

there are now 'gestures' so you can swipe left or right to change views.

changing views scrolls to the top of the new view. (i wanted to remember position in each view, but I'm not there yet)

scrolling hides all controls to give full space to tweets.
switching views or pressing any key brings controls back.

communications are now encrypted as witter uses https.

that's probably everything. still loads to do, but figured it was worth moving up to 0.2.0 for.
there was a temptation to keep fixing things and tweaking things without releasing and update. but at least this way i get feedback.

yes i know you want avatars. no i haven't decided to add them, the amount of coding, memory usage and the extra network traffic leave me still unconvinced.

twaelti | # 110 | 2009-12-20, 21:37 | Report

Indeed: It was a user problem on my side . Your password field uppercased the first char in the field and I didn't see that. Perhaps a "Test connection" button might make it clearer.

In mClock, I do the following python code with gconf to load a stored conf variable called timeMode and reset it to the initial value of "maxi" if the read value is invalid.

Thanks again for witter, it's great!