My Twitter Widget (previously Twitterlex) v1.2
This app is DISCONTINUED due to API changes at Twitter. It also broke the Twitter trademark policy.
My Twitter Widget was a simple Mac OS X Dashboard Widget that showed you the last 30 twitters by you and your Twitter friends, updating every 60 seconds when visible. When hidden, it updates every 5 minutes and sending Growl notifications if anyone has updated their status.
How to use
Mac OS X 10.4.3 Tiger or above is required.
If you’re using Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget’s icon in the Widget Bar to open it.
If you’re using a browser other than Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, unarchive it and place it in /Library/Widgets/ in your home folder. show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget’s icon in the Widget Bar to open it.
On your first install, the widget will flip over so you can provide it your Twitter username and password. Click Done and the widget will fetch the latest 30 status updates by you and your friends.
You can also update your own status right from within the widget by typing your new status into the box and clicking the button. At this point Twitter will also update the list to reflect your update.
FAQ – Frequently Assumed Questions
How do I disable the Growl notifications from the widget?
Open System Preferences, click on Growl, click on the Applications tab, then find the widget’s entry and change any notification options you want there. Check Growl’s documentation if you need more advice on Growl.
Change History
1.2 – 2007/02/07 – download
- Twitter is standardising on 140 character length tweets, so changed to reflect that
- Tweet button now says ‘Tweet’
- Status update text box now marginally bigger… marginally.
- Tweaked the background colour, just a little…
1.1 – 2007/01/28 – download
- Now only updates every 5 minutes in the background.
- Growl notification when a new statuses are detected while the widget is in the background.
- Now includes update notification for future releases.
- A little balloon appears warning the user when their status is getting close to or exceeding maximum allowed character.
- Animations are now turned off when the dashboard is hidden.
1.0beta – 2007/01/21 – announcement, old download
- Initial release
Known Bugs in 1.2
- Growl notifications with quotes could come through inaccurately.
Todo
- Support for public timeline feed?
- Support for latest updates from friends feed?
- Colour choices?
When you say it updates every 60 seconds, do you mean only when Dashboard is visible? Or it’s literally sitting in the bkg and calling out every 60 seconds?
Feature request: Growl notifications. It would be hot if Twitterlex could post new notifications, or possibly just the latest from a batch of updates, vial Growl.
I’m pretty sure that Twitterlex isn’t updating in the background. I’ll make doubly sure.
Growl notification… that would mean it would have to be checking in the background. I could get it to only update every 5 minutes in the background though. But first to figure out how to do growl notifications from Javascript…
Checked. It is updating every minute, even when hidden. I’ve formulated a fix, but I want to add the option for background updating every 5 minutes and if updates have happened, growl notification.
I like the idea, but my Twitterlex isn’t updating the list. It’s just blank. I can, however, update my status from it, but the list is still blank.
Matt, have you tried refreshing the widget? Select the widget in the dashboard, the hit Command+R to refresh it. That sometimes fixes issues.
after I refresh it, it makes me enter my username and password again. but it still has nothing in the list
What’s your twitter username, Matt? Are you cooldude127? You said that you can update your status… that means your password is correct.
Tell me what you get when you visit http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.json — you should get a ~20kb text file. Can you paste its contents to a http://cl1p.net/ and post that url here?
Ultimately if nothing is coming out of Twitter for you, we’ll need to talk to Twitter support :/
I had same issue as Matt. I fixed it by entering my password again and pressing enter. Is started working after that. I know the password was correct because I had updated my status by the widget.
i get a 404 when trying to download. am i just doing something wrong? 🙂
Oops, wordpress 2.1 has changed how it handles filenames on upload … grr! Both links working now.
The install and updates are working fine, but it doesn’t seem to be registering with Growl. Is there some threshold of messages that need to occur? I only have a few friends and they post sporadicly.
Nice app though. Thanks.
Hi Chris,
It will register with Growl on its first growl notification. To try it, write an update, then hit enter, and then really quickly hit F12 — it should send your update status, then when it’s done refresh the statuses. By that point your dashboard will be hidden and you’ll get a growl notification 🙂
Sure enough…that seemed to work. Thanks. Odd that I didn’t get a notification before. Lemme phrase the problem another way. In what situations *don’t* you get a growl notification? It seems to be when the app is in the foreground, obviously no notification. So background only? I must have been playing with it every time my friends twittered.
Much Thanks!
–chris
Yes, it only Growl notifies when the dashboard is hidden.
brett, as like some people here i’ve had the same problem (no updates, no twits). fixed by hitting enter after entering in one of the username or password fields. got this in console if i just hit done:
2007-02-12 23:49:39.084 DashboardClient[1211] /SourceCache/JavaScriptCore/JavaScriptCore-418.3/bindings/objc/WebScriptObject.mm:211:[1211] JavaScript exception: Null value
2007-02-12 23:49:52.988 DashboardClient[1211] /SourceCache/JavaScriptCore/JavaScriptCore-418.3/bindings/objc/WebScriptObject.mm:211:[1211] JavaScript exception: Null value
cheers,
pedro
i am now getting this, and twitterlex doesn’t update:
2007-02-13 00:28:16.605 DashboardClient[13250] (com.webfroot.widget.twitterlex) file:///Users/pfig/Library/Widgets/Twitterlex.wdgt/twitterlex.js: Parse error (line: 102)
(event handler):Parse error
the offending line seems pretty harmless to me, so no clue.
ok, the problem, for me at least, is in the plist file it has a random string before the username and password. i deleted that junk and now it works.
line 41 of twitterlex.js:
return widget.identifier + ‘-‘ + key;
delete “widget.identifier + ‘-‘ +”
and it works.
Yeah, the identifier is there so you can have more than one widget, in case you have more than one twitter identity…
updated to the latest version. will not post anymore. please look into and fix
never mind.
welp. i guess when it’s retrieving the preferences it isn’t using the identifier correctly.
I like this, and prefer it to Twidget as it integrates with Growl, lists Twitters the “the other way up”, and is more compact.
However:
– I had a few days where it wouldn’t work at all. Reinstalling made no difference. In the end I found that the preferences file had become corrupted (it contained some random HTML page), so I deleted it and it was all fine again.
– As of now, the widget is clearing itself as soon as it refreshes, which is annoying, just started doing that in the last 2 days. I wonder if this is related to the line of text on my main Twitter page that says that it updates every 2 minutes?
– can you make a link in a twitter clickable? That would be really nice.
I like this widget. I prefer it to Twidget as it integrates with Growl, lists Twitters the “the other way up”, and is more compact.
However:
– I had a few days where it wouldn’t work at all. Reinstalling made no difference. In the end I found that the preferences file had become corrupted (it contained some random HTML page), so I deleted it and it was all fine again.
– As of now, the widget is clearing itself as soon as it refreshes, which is annoying, just started doing that in the last 2 days. I wonder if this is related to the line of text on my main Twitter page that says that it updates every 2 minutes?
– can you make a link in a twitter clickable? That would be really nice.
Ehh, Brett, FYI, Twitterlex won’t update unless you press the return key while on the back side of the widget. Pressing done flips the widget back over, but it doesn’t display a username or update then.
The font is unusably small on my Macbook. I wish there were some options available to change appearance, font, etc.
I am a new user of Twitter and Twitterlex (v1.2). On the widget it says my Twitter name, “isen”, what I am doing, “working”, and then “undefined”. What is supposed to be in the “undefined” field?
I wrote analog of this widget for my site but for Yahoo.Widgets. Is you planning write a tutorial for making widgets for MacOS?
Thanks!
Just installed it, and the timestamps are all undefined. Same problem as Isen.
Using Leopard if it matters.
A) The security words are impossible to read below. That stinks.
B) I’m not seeing any posts in Twitterlex. It’s just blank. It can successfully post, but that’s all.
C) This website is taking minutes to load. Something is screwed up 🙁
D) The audio version of the recaptcha words is IMPOSSIBLE to hear. IS THIS SOME KIND OF CRUEL JOKE?
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Interested in tutorial for making widgets for MacOS, too..
Great widget, thanks! Hey, why isn’t the input field at the top of the widget? (Given that tweets are stacked chronologically from the top, it seems the most straightforward place to put it…)
Good work.
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Fixed some of the bugs with Twitterlex 1.2.
http://scum.textdriven.com/public/Twitterlex.zip
This version fixes the undefined date problem and automatically creates links for URLs.
Feel free to submit this to Apple’s widget download page if you like. I can’t since I’m not the main author of the code.
So I put in my user id and password and … it just blinks and blinks and never sends any tweets. But nor does it produce any diagnostic messages. Clues, please?
I, too, had the problem of the widget not picking up my feed (mentioned by a few people in previous posts). But it did work if, after entering username and password I then hit the RETURN key on the main part of my keyboard (ENTER on the keypad had no effect).
No. Spoke to soon. Solution mentioned brings up my user name, but not the latest status updates. And although it appears to be sending my test updates, they’re not showing up on my twitter home page. What’s up here?
Alright. Found the solution to MY issue when experimenting with Twitterific. On my first login to Twitterific I got the following message:
“Passwords that contain non-alphanumeric characters can be a problem with the Twitter API.”
My password was pretty strong and DID have a non-alphanumeric character in it. Went back on to the Twitter website, changed my password, and – voila! – Twitterlex works beautifully for me now.
I’m surprised that Twitter doesn’t advise its users about this quirk with the passwords – but certainly I’d recommend including this advice somewhere prominently on this page.
I agree with Thom ‘s recommendation about passwords.
Hey, just grabbed your widget today and its not half bad. Of course I have some gripes with it, but what egotistical mac user doesn’t when he finds a new piece of software. These are suggestions that strike me after having used Twitterflex for 2 days:
1. A prettier interface. The placement of textboxes and buttons is just fine, but its needs some prettification.
2. I was going to suggest growl support because I hadn’t seen it in action. But when I came here to do so, I saw it was already included, I think I just don’t have enough friends updating enough to have witnessed it yet.
3. An html buggy thing? One of my friends updated a status with an quotation in it, Twitterific displayed it fine but Twitterflex decided to substitute the quotation symbol with "
All an all, I think you very much on the right track here.
Hi there, it seems that someone else has already done this before 🙂 but I’ve slightly modified Twitterlex to have URLs highlighted and clickable… feel free to use this code in your next release Brett!
I’m surprised that there is no character count in this widget. I can post with no count from IM. Please add the character count!
Both widgets on my Mac Pro and my MacBook Air have a problem with the time stamps; I’m always given just ‘undefined’ rather than anything like ‘1m ago’ or what not.
Great widget, though! Thank You!
hey brian, check the posts above for the updated widget to your “undefined” problems.
Doesn’t work at all for me. It worked for a few hours, now it stopped.
I appear to have stumbled upon a bug.
When starting a tweet with “@username & @username” (without quotes), the tweet only sends the first @username, and nothing else from the tweet.