Notices

Tweed Suit 0.8.0-3 is currently in extras-testing.

Tweed Suit 0.8.3-3 is currently in extras-devel.

Tweed Suit 0.8.3-1 For N950 (alpha) available for N9/N950

Tweed Suit is a desktop style Twitter client and RSS reader for people with good eyesight and the need for massive amounts of information. You don't actually have to have a Twitter account to use it. You can just use it as a information gathering tool, but obviously without the direct messages, home and mentions.



Here is some help in getting started:

To authenticate yourself fill in your username and password in the user dialog (click the user icon). The icon should change to indicate you're authenticated. NOTE: password is stored in plaintext in a somewhat obscurely named sqlite database. You can enter some bogus username and password to remove the real one from there if you want.

When you're done authenticating (or don't want to) then you can add a column. Click the + to open column dialog.
There are 7 different kinds of columns: Home, Mentions, DM, search, user, list and RSS

Home, mentions and dm don't really use whatever you write in the box, but you can use it to name the column. Mine are called Home, Mentions and DM
Search columns search twitter for whatever you write in the box. you can use AND and OR to specify. I have one with
N900 OR maemo OR #meego
User columns display one users tweets. write the username in the box. Clicking someones twitter name conveniently creates a user column for that user.
List columns show a twitter list. enter username/listname in the box. For example @almehdin/maemo
RSS columns display an RSS feed. Enter the url in the box. If you want lots of stuff I recommend using a feed combiner, for example http://www.feedcombine.co.uk/ or http://www.rssmix.com/. Atom doesn't work.


Anyway, I hope you like it. I will update this first post with information and updates.


Screenshot:


There are a bunch of known bugs, but I haven't had time to fix a bugtracker so please write here if you find something.

Tips and tricks
- select the language you want to translate tweets to from the authentication dialog
- click and hold top bar of a column to open move dialog
- you can view a larger version of peoples profile pics by clicking on them
- you can tweet rss feed links by clicking tweet this. You're able to modify the tweet before you send (tags and shorten urls if need be)
- for battery friendly idle usage, remove all autorefreshing columns, except those you want notified. I usually have Home on manual and mentions on autorefresh 900 seconds with notifications.
- you see a whole discussion between two people by clicking the "in reply to" link, and then the same in the new column and so on.
- long texts in rss feeds are continued in the dropdown
- press and hold the aA button to reset font size to default

Changelog

EDIT: 0.8.3-2
- column width adjusts in portrait
- translations are back
- some UI changes

EDIT: 0.8.0-3
- Select translation language (select from user dialog)
- autorotate
- bugfixes

EDIT: 0.7.8-2
- HTTPS support finally!
- a little star marks favorited tweets. More features regarding favorites will appear in a future version.

EDIT: 0.7.7-1
- keyboard navigation (left / right, wraps for quicker navigation)
- resize tweet and column box in portrait mode
- slightly faster column loading on startup
- textfield focus

EDIT: 0.7.6-2
- Fixed single tweet bug
- Some minor changes to bottom buttons UI. Touching the very bottom of the screen anywhere now makes the buttons more visible. Quicknav buttons are a bit further apart.
- Added a "Reply All" button. Thanks to lifenexus for that brilliant idea! Something I've been missing, but never thought about adding.

EDIT: 0.7.6-1 submitted to autobuilder
- adds soft start, where it loads one column at a time, to prevent choking or crashing on start. Takes longer though :/
- sets column cachebuffer to 0 at start. Changes after scrolling. Can cause choppiness the first time you scroll.
- text resize has a total of 6 sizes, from 10 to 22.
- quick navigation

EDIT: 0.7.5-1 submitted to autobuilder
- adds fullscreen switch similar to that in MicroB
- adds quick font size change button.
- modify refresh rate and notifications
- special thanks to Michael Secord (Gizmokid2005) for some ui work

EDIT: 0.7.3-2 submitted to autobuilder
- fixes the stupid mistake I made that made it impossible to move columns.

EDIT: 0.7.3 submitted to autobuilder
- changes some graphics
- improves profile image viewer
- adds "loading" animation to pictures
- fixes that makes all "loading" animations stop hogging cpu while invisible
- all stored columns are now loaded when not authenticated (but only the ones not requiring authentication shows anything)
- you can now add list and user columns when not authenticated
- username is shown in auth dialog when authenticated
- something else, but I've forgotten what it was.

Planned/Requested features (Sorted by anticipated implementation speed)
QUICK:
- Autorotate (I forgot that this wasn't there because I use forced autorotation with cssu)
- Grey out send button when character limit reached

MEDIUM:
- Help/About dialog (To help people get started)
- Favorite/Unfavorite tweet
- Column focus, up down navigation
- Block/Unblock user

SLOW:
- Favorites column
- Trending topics
- New followers list
- A way to 'Short Name' the columns
- ATOM support and improved RSS support
- Notifications in one box or on top of app.
- Geolocation

VERY SLOW:
- Image previews (twitpic, tumbler etc)
- Proper RSS post previews
- Map integration for showing locations

UTOPISTIC: (Don't hold your breath)
- upload pictures/videos (use sharing plugins instead)
- Facebook
- Video viewing integration

Test results
I did some endurance testing on a proper PR1.3 N900 (mine is full of devel stuff and cssu and whatnot, this one is clean) and to turns out Tweed Suit uses very little battery and is very stable. Left it for 24 hours with 5 columns, 3 of which were slowly auto refreshing (2400 seconds), and it only ate 20% battery over that period. Going to try with what I use, which is 900 to 1200 second refresh rate and see how much it eats.



PS I also use Tweed Suit on my Linux desktop and on my work computer without any changes. It scale nicely:
http://i.imgur.com/KPqd2.jpg

Just wanted to post and say thanks. The version that was in the repos earlier today refused to login to my twitter account, but after updating this evening, it's running beautifully!

A few things you could tweak, sure, but this (IMO) is the best available client for the N900 right now.

Where are you keeping the source for this?

Finally you released it

You can find the source from the maemo repos or tweedsuit on gitorious.

Feel free to share any ideas for improvement.

Brilliant application, I like you comment about "have good eyesight". Thank goodness I do. Font size is perfect. I have had a good play with your Tweed Suit and especially the seach bar with all its options and it is truly powerful. I already have 15 columns with all my info.

What I really like and find amazing and so useful to see in twitter is the TRANSLATE button in the more menu. I dont think I have seen this in any other twitter application for N900. It's so useful and quick to translate text.

If I could make some suggestions:

• A GO TO button or icon on left side to take me to a column, perhaps it can show a pull down of column names.
• The menu on the left to slide in, creating more space on the screen.
• A way to 'Short Name' the columns afterwards (feeds currently have the entire URL name showing).
• Allow a column to be edited (e.g. I would like to set the notify option on, which I didn't do when I created it.
• After logging into another account, a new column was added at the begining but the column had no name.
• Theme choices or a choice to change colours.
• How difficult would it be to scroll to the end (right side) and automatically appear at the left side (similar to N900 desktop scrolling...a loop?
• Where is your DONATE button?
• Where is the ABOUT screen where you can show off version, creator details?

Overall, you have done an excellent job. Please sort out the second last suggestion and I will be happy to oblige.

cheers,

Mike

live long and prosper! #tweedsuit

i love this app!!

Loving it...brilliant app...only been using this for few hours and find myself thinking how i lived without this app these many days..

I'm loving this app as its the only thing that gets close to a desktop view. I know I'm getting old but I can only use it when wearing glasses as the font size has to be the smallest of any apps. Any chance for the following options:
1. number of columns on view
2. choice of font sizes
3. rotated view showing one column

Whoa.. pushing the limits! It's nice with the dynamic loading. Although sideways scrolling suffers a bit. I use 3-6 columns on N900.

1. Good idea. I could use that on the desktop version too. I'll look into it.
2. But how would you get it back?
3. I haven't come up with a good and non-messy method to sort that one yet. It's been on my mind.
4. I'm planning to add some editing of that sort to the move column dropdown (longpress top bar)
5. Switching accounts on the fly causes some weirdness. I recommend writing username/password, click login and then restart the application. You can launch the app as root from xterm and register another account there if you want two simultaneously btw.
6. Could be nice, but it's pretty low priority right now, unless it's really easy
7. ^^ check first post.
8. Oh yeah. I guess I could add some crap to the login dialog. It's so small and pathetic anyway

1. Not sure what you mean. Do you want a counter somewhere?
2. That shouldn't be too hard, and It could be really useful when you use it on other devices too. I'll take it under consideration
3. It does! Sort of. Unfortunately I've made stuff rather stupidly so the width of the columns is not very dynamic, but I agree it's annoying. Would be a lot of work so It's kinda low priority.


Thank you for the ideas. I probably wont implement the bigger stuff yet, since I have a couple of bugs I
want to get fixed first. But if they prove difficult I'll maybe implement some fun stuff in between.