Twitm
I enjoy Twitter a lot. There’s many, many clients for the service. I’ve grown to like Alert Thingy (yes, that’s the actual title) which actually integrates with Friendfeed too.
But I felt a bit ashamed using Adobe AIR. Inspired by garrett’s stylesheet tweets, I created a Prism app bundle that makes Twitter main web-interface nice and compact. It wouldn’t be complete without an icon.
I couldn’t figure out how to nicely integrate the multi resolution icon into the bundle though. While the mac and windows icons can be multi-res, for Linux we get grandpa XPM. I have no idea why the spec defines to use XPM. Such an ancient format incapable of using alpha transparency needs to die. It’s not like gecko would have trouble rendering PNG. Also sad to see my whining hasn’t been fruitful yet. Especially when there’s a library available!
As for how to use this thing — for now you need to copy the individual sizes to ~/.icons/hicolor/. Once you let Prism generate your .desktop file, edit the link to the icon to just say Icon=twitm. That way you get all the sizes nicely thresholded on the panel/menu/desktop.
Maybe using the mobile site would have been safer, but I prefer the javascript character counter, so I went with styling the main site. As soon as the site layout changes, expect brokage :/
- New! Download Twitm 0.4
Update: It bound to happen. Twitter guys updated the site in the meantime, so this no longer works and I don’t feel motivated enough to create a new stylesheet. Sorry folks.
April 30th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
Hi, i have unzip the bundle in ~/.prism/XXXXXX.default/webapps/twitm to execute correctly, great web app !
April 30th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
does the page automatically refresh?
April 30th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
If you make this a webapp bundle (http://wiki.mozilla.org/Prism/Bundle) then it’s clickable to install (rather than telling people to unpack it into ~/WebApps).
April 30th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
Owen, the automatic refresh doesn’t work yet. I thought it will be a piece of cake, but it’s somehow sandboxed. http://wiki.mozilla.org/Prism/Scripting isn’t very verbose. Patches welcome.
April 30th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
It’s nice… I never used prism before but the concept is interesting.
What I noticed is that the update button label is not readable with a bright theme. (looks nice with darkiloche gtkrc)
Also, is there a way to make the prism window remember it’s window size?
April 30th, 2008 at 11:03 pm
Nice
.
May 1st, 2008 at 12:33 am
The window size should be stored. I’m doing something wrong, as the example bundles work right. Any hints?
May 1st, 2008 at 12:45 am
I don’t have any problem about prim storing the window size
May 1st, 2008 at 2:04 am
For what it’s worth, I added icns read support in gdk-pixbuf a couple of months ago.
May 1st, 2008 at 5:39 am
Why does your whining say to use the Mac icon format rather than, say, a PNG with multiple images or a tarfile of multiple PNGs? Is the Mac format open and public?
May 1st, 2008 at 8:10 am
Very nice work as usual, a bit off topic but could you tell me what emerald decoration you are using.. looks similar to macslows and I am looking for a nice slick one.
May 1st, 2008 at 10:05 am
@John: That’s Gilouche, which is a Metacity theme (not Emerald)
May 1st, 2008 at 10:20 am
Thomas, never in that article I suggest to be using the mac icon format instead of PNGs.
May 5th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
We’ve discontinued XPM and the next version of Prism will use PNG on Linux (native formats are still used on Mac and Windows, or you can use PNG and it will convert for you automatically).