Notices

Originally Posted by thp

And here's some more generic feedback after trying out your app:

• Buttons should be hildon.Button instances (with FINGER size, probably)
• The gtk.Entry you have should be hildon.Entry (for the styling)

Originally Posted by thp

Also, it's not really obvious that the entry box belongs to the "Search" button (in addition to other things). A nicer design would be to open a dialog with a text entry box when the "Search" button is clicked and open the search results in another view (StackableWindow).

Originally Posted by thp

When I'm not entering any authentication data, Clicking on "timeline"+"refresh" should probably use a Hildon Note instead of a dialog with the title (and ideally with a 401 error, you could show the login dialog, as this is where most users would want to go in this situation).

Originally Posted by thp

The "Exit" button in the appmenu is redundant, as there is the "X" button in the titlebar already.

What does "Invert" in the app menu do?

Originally Posted by thp

The context menu should pop up at the location of the mouse coordinates, and should have the widget name set to "hildon-context-sensitive-menu" to get the correct styling.

Originally Posted by thp

The "TwitPic!" item should use a hildon file chooser instead of the GTK+ one.

Originally Posted by thp

I would also suggest either opening a new subview for different content (e.g. "Trends", etc..) or at least changing the window title so that the user knows which "mode" he/she is currently in (e.g. "Witter - Search for maebar" or "Witter - Your timeline").

Originally Posted by thp

Oh, and a feature request: Add support for identi.ca

Thanks for the great application - I especially like the "search" functionality, as the only other twitter app that I know of does not yet have this functionality

Originally Posted by rcadden

How possible is including support for multiple accounts?

Originally Posted by dwould

Hmm, I switched to using glade to define the user interface in the mistaken idea that this would make my life easier. If there are hildon specific versions of everything, does that mean i should just give up with glade? or is there some glade ui design software that will let me use hildon objects?

Originally Posted by dwould

I could switch to hildon notes, what is the specific advantage over a dialog?,
I guess I could catch all non-auth responses and drive the login dialog. that said it should go straight to the login dialog on first use now anyway.

Originally Posted by dwould

good tip on the styling. That said i like the pop-up in the top right, maybe I'll try setting it to pointer location and see how I get on with it.

Originally Posted by dwould

I'll look at changing the window title, because I specifically didn't want to open new windows for the different views.

Originally Posted by dwould

given that I don't use identi.ca, and my code is hopelessly badly architected, I suspect this one is unlikely. at least for some time. Sorry

Originally Posted by dwould

it's entirely possible. the question is really around quite how that is best implemented.
would you want to be able to switch between them, doing distinctly one at a time
would you want any refresh to simultaneously get from all accounts? or just currently selected one?
if you intermixed views, would you need to see which account a tweet related to?

I've never used multiple accounts so I'm not sure what would make the most sense.

Originally Posted by thp

You should use GtkBuilder instead of Glade. There's an automated utility to do this called "gtk-builder-convert". You can use Hildon widgets with GtkBuilder (i.e. replace GtkButton with HildonButton). Please note that bug 4718 will cause the styling to still be incorrect, so you have to set the name of the widget to "HildonButton-finger" (or "HildonButton-thumb") after loading it from the .ui file, like this:

Code:

yourwidget.set_name('HildonButton-finger')

You should be able to do the same thing for a GtkButton to get the styling, but this is untested, and not really beautiful



A HildonNote is the "big" yellow, modal thing where the message is shown until the note is touched:

Code:

win = ... # your main window
msg = 'some text'
note = hildon.hildon_note_new_information(win, msg)
note.run()
note.destroy()

An alternative would be to use a HildonBanner that has a timeout for non-critical messages: http://maemomm.garage.maemo.org/docs...res/banner.png



In all the built-in applications, context menus pop up under the touch point, so for consistency, it should probably be like that for your application, too. Even on the desktop when right-clicking somewhere, the menu pops up at the cursor position, and not at the top left corner of the screen. Of course, there are issues with this approach on a finger-based UI (because the content that pops up is hidden by the physical finger), but it's how things are done in the Maemo 5 UI today.



If you convert to GtkBuilder, think about using HildonStackableWindow + sub-views. It's nice, easy, and makes the user navigation more friendly. It also restricts the possible actions that the user can do (i.e. because in a search results view you cannot click on "Timeline", you have to go back first), leading to less errors that you have to catch



AFAIK Identi.ca has a Twitter-compatible API, so just having a "API URL" setting should be enough to support Identi.ca as well (with the default being the URL of the Twitter API).