Wednesday, March 25, 2009

PockeTwit v.68 Released

After a lot of work, PockeTwit v.68 is finally ready for release. This version has quite a few new features so I thought I'd detail them here.

One of the most visible changes is the addition of "nested" side menu items. I was running out of space on the side menus and it was keeping me from being able to add some requested features, so some side menu items can now have multiple sub-items. For example, the left menu now has an "Other Timelines..." item. When clicked, that opens a submenu that allows you to search, view your favorites, or view the Public timeline.

The multimedia capabilities of pocketwit have recieved a major ovehaul thanks to @roelvandenbrand. Roel had been requesting that I add support for image posts to mobypicture.com for quite a while. Eventually he saw it just wasn't going to be a high priority on my list so he decided to implement it himself!

Once he got started, he did way more than just add mobypicture hosting-- he put in a system that lets the user choose from several image hosts. He also changed the posting process so it uploads a picture first, THEN gets the URL and puts it into the post (so you can see how many characters it will take up). He even implemented a way to fetch images from the hosts, so we can show thumbnails of images from other posts without having to actually launch a browser. Be sure to set which picture service you want to host your images in the "Other Settings" page.

I've also added a new "addressbook" for posting. Sometimes you want to include someone's @name in your post without having to find one of their posts to @reply. Now if you start typing "@p" in the post screen, it will pop-up a list of all users in your addressbook whos screen names start with "p". This makes it easy to select that username and have it inserted into your post. It also works for "d " (direct messages) as well.

Unfortunately twitter does not provide an easy way to get the screen names of everyone you are following, so the addressbook is automatically filled with users from your Friends and Messages timelines. As you receive more status updates and messages from other users, they are added to the addressbook.

Some other minor features have been added as well -- you can now copy the text of a selected item to an email. There's an option to automatically scroll to the top of the list when new items arrive.

There's also quite a few bugfixes, and it might even be a little better about memory and battery usage.

I hope you enjoy the new version. If you have any ideas you'd like to see implemented in the future, be sure to go to our Uservoice page and submit them.

2 comments:

Eric Atkins said...

I've really been enjoying your app. Looking forward to trying out the update.

On Twitter: @ericatkins

Unknown said...

Great app, really like it.

http://twitter.com/jlauricchio