Introducing GTweetBar (alpha)

This is my Xournal entry of April 27th 2009. It clearly speaks of how much time I take in between imagining and creating things. I need to improve a lot on that part, or maybe organize my time well, and hack myself away from that saturday-sunday syndrome where you feel like spending the weekend doing nothing for you've been already been wasting time for college for 12 hrs a day away from your system.
Oh sweet, this snap is when I had just upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 :)


Been almost 6 months I guess :o. A couple of months back I was playing around with gtk, glade, etc which gave some confidence to work over making it for real. So here we have - GTweetBar - A GNOME Panel Applet that lets you update your twitter status on the fly. An omnipresent, super-simplified twitter-client for your linux desktop. (which is still in development)
I initially started writing this applet with PyGTK and glade. The tutorials for writing a panel applet on gnome are pretty limited and there is a shortage of simple examples for beginners as far as I think. I found an interesting problem during the development, the Entry box did not respond when the app is run as applet. I found it pretty weird, but that led into a better understanding of how signals and handled, why and when to use an Event box and the use of applet.request_focus(). All this had to be understood by reading a random pastebin entry! :)
There were more issues coming later, I got it tested from a few friends on twitter. It's pretty cool to find the Issues section on github. It lets users of your software communicate and talk about any problems they encounter. Pretty cool to have it along the project page. Github \m/
Testing it on Ubuntu 8.04 on my old PC helped uncover some more compatibility issues. It seems that gtk.gdk.Color("#93E9FF") isn't backward compatible. You can use gtk.gdk.color_parse("#93E9FF") instead to ensure it works.

Here are few snaps -




As of now, I have to fix a lot of bugs (pending after end sems). It's not working on Ubuntu 9.10 under applet mode. Working with YuviPanda on PyMos taught me a lot of things. I also used GConf to store user preferences. Man! Its dead simple to use.. So this calls for an extension of todo list :) -

[ ] alerts for failed tweets...
[ ] loads of exception handling here and there
[ ] new setup using setuptools
[ ] test portability of python_twitter or throw it as dependency in setup()
[ ] add logging
[ ] optparse/argparse
[ ] tool tips to show current status
[ ] beautify the code
[ ] a drop down list of tweets

So go ahead fork it, test it, use it - GTweetBar alpha.

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