Gwibbles and Gwibbly for your Gwibber 2 only

Hola 2010! I was trying to add my recent css3 gradient and round corners gyaan to Gwibber themes. Gwibber is an open source microblogging client for GNOME that supports Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, Pownce, Identi.ca and other popular social web services. Even though it crashes, sleeps for long hours, doesn't run in the first place in some cases, yet you can't ignore its presence if you're a desktop Linux user. No matter how much you hear stories about its fails, it still projects itself as a promising, well-integrated micro-blogging client for future.
Something that I love about it is - its just another pygtk app with pywebkitgtk embedded in it to do the interfacing. Maybe this sounds slow, but to ui designers this is the highest flexibility one can ask for. Heck, with a small abount of javascript you can even add a retweet button. It takes nothing more than some jQuery lines. At the same time it gives you excellent opportunity to express your creativity through CSS3.
The theming has gone through some changes. Previously as I remember, we had a pure html and css to edit, to which a small javascript snippet fed the input. The current Gwibber uses Mako templates. Which itself is written in Python and has a non-Xml syntax, claims more performance, etc. At first sight I thought the theming has become more complex, but a closer look and little more playing around will make you familiar to the modularity of Gwibber's current templates. It was pretty easy to hack around after understanding it some more and I would say Mako templates keeps the code sane even if you hack around in a frenzy. Now you don't have to worry much if people are going to open their facebook accounts under your theme.
Just tried making a two themes today. I call them Gwibbly and Gwibbles. While Gwibbly makes my dream of Tweetie like interface for Gwibber a little closer to reality, Gwibbles is an experimental theme that tries to show tweets/feeds like bubbles floating on screen (don't expect any animations though!)

Gwibbles on Gnome and KDE respectively -


Gwibbly on Gnome -

Gwibber 2 has a nice account tree that gives you quick overview of your accounts

Download them here - http://github.com/ideamonk/Gwibber2-themes/tarball/master
Fork them here - http://github.com/ideamonk/Gwibber2-themes

Though I missed on the css3 box shadow in these themes. Somehow -webkit-box-shadow is not working. According to this mailing list post and snapshot, it should be working in pywebkitgtk. I wonder why!

Gwibbly, another theme for Gwibber

Damn! its 6 am already, this one tool exceptionally more time. I noticed many cool looking twitter clients on OS X have that shiny-little twitter bubble to display message. Though not that, but this one - Gwibbly, is one attempt to get those tweet bubbles into gwibber. Initially I did round corners with javascript, which actually slowed down the rendering very much, replaced that by -webkit-border-radius: 10px; and done :) Well, this time I got 3 variants -

To install the new gwibber theme:

1. Download the new theme from google code
2. Decompress it to ~/.local/share/gwibber/ui/themes/
You should end up with folders names gwibbly-* with a few files inside it.
Make that path if it not present
3. In Gwibber, open Preferences (Gwibber->Preferences or Ctrl+P).
Pull down the theme chooser and choose ‘gwibbly’, or 'gwibbly-dark' etc.
4. On my system, it took Gwibber a few seconds to apply the new theme.
Be patient, and things should shape up.

Gwibbiquity-micro

As I switched back to 1280x800, I felt the previous theme was too big to show more than 5 tweets a page. So I just modded the old one a little bit into a micro edition.


To install the new gwibber theme:

1. Download the new theme from github
2. Decompress it to ~/.local/share/gwibber/ui/themes/
You should end up with a folder called gwibbiquity-micro with a few files inside it.
Make that path if it not present
3. In Gwibber, open Preferences (Gwibber->Preferences or Ctrl+P).
Pull down the theme chooser and choose ‘gwibbiquity-micro’.
4. On my system, it took Gwibber a few seconds to apply the new theme.
Be patient, and things should shape up.

Gwibbiquity a theme for Gwibber

I've been using Gwibber for accessing twitter and syncing my facebook status with twitter. Earlier I was disappointed with Adobe AIR based clients for AIR itself didn't run well on amd64 :/ . Gwibber's default theme looks quite disappointing and the best you can get is Brave by Ginkyo. Gwibber 2.0's prototype looks awesome, but before we get there, I would like to add up one more theme to the project - Gwibbiquity - another theme based on Brave and inspired by the gradients of Lounge.
It didn't take more than an hour to come up with it. Thanks to Gerry Ilagan's tutorial on how to create one :) Here's how it looks -

To install the new gwibber theme:

1. Download the new theme from github
2. Decompress it to ~/.local/share/gwibber/ui/themes/
You should end up with a folder called gwibbiquity with a few files inside it.
Make that path if it not present
3. In Gwibber, open Preferences (Gwibber->Preferences or Ctrl+P).
Pull down the theme chooser and choose ‘gwibbiquity’.
4. On my system, it took Gwibber a few seconds to apply the new theme.
Be patient, and things should shape up.

* thanks to Jake Tolbert for easy installation instructions