MahTweets 2.7 Released!
On Wednesday night, we pushed out another version of MahTweets, version 2.7. It’s been a long time between releases (3 months!) but a huge amount of work has gone into it.
New Features
- Autocomplete Everywhere
In previous versions we didn’t have autocomplete for contact names. Now we do. And its everywhere you can type! - Yammer Plugin
Fairly basic at the moment, but we will get it up to "Twitter level" of support in the next version. Currently you can view/send and downloading attachments. - Plurk Plugin
- Ping.fm Plugin
No media ‘pings’ yet, but that’ll come soon – still beat Seesmic to it! ;) - Bit.ly Plugin
We couldn’t support bit.ly in previous versions due to how IUrlShortener plugins worked, but now they can store credentials much like any other plugin. - Geotagging for Flickr & Twitter (both viewing and sending geotagged tweets)
- Searching
We now have the ISearchProvider interface, which lets IMicroblogs (aka, connection plugins like Twitter) provide a way to search.At the moment went have "regular" Twitter search and streaming Twitter search. Although not entirely certain, I’m fairly confident to say we’re the first or one of the first full feature Twitter clients with streaming search support!
Streaming search maintains a constant connection to twitter, but you get results in real time. How fast? In most tests, you get the tweet roughly the same time it appears in the web interface for the person tweeting!
Down the track we’ll be adding Yammer and Plurk ISearchProviders, perhaps even Facebook.
- Local Searching
- Read/Unread tracking
This is optional, but you can have all updates marked as unread as they come in. Click on the ‘unread’ banner (or really any of update except the text) to mark it read, or the new ‘Mark all read’ button (the big tick on the side) - Profile Columns
Although only supported by the Twitter plugin in this version, MahTweets can now show additional information about a particular contact inside MahTweets, instead of having to go out to the browser.We’re looking at making this extensible so ‘information’ can be pulled from places like Twadges/etc, once we find the right API’s.
Improvements
- Twitter support
MahTweets now supports more of the recent twitter features such as:- geotagging,
- lists,
- block&report as spam,
- "new style" retweets
- Filtering
Our filtering was previously pretty good. Now its pretty awesome. Tri-state filtering means you can do nothing, include or exclude contacts or streams ("streams" are types of updates, ‘mentions’ or ‘direct messages’) from a column. - UX
This version started as a big UX/UI overhaul. The key improvements are less WPF blurriness (mostly caused by drop shadows), a "smaller"/less space wasting update template, clearer/nicer looking icons, far more intuitive settings/setup window and a few other niceties. - Multi-parent behaviour
This problem is almost exclusive to MahTweets, and we’ve mostly solved it. Most Twitter clients that support multiple accounts dont support multiple accounts in a single column. Well, since MahTweets does support this, the problem is that what happens when TwitterAccountA and TwitterAccountB are both following TwitterUserC?Do you double up the Tweet from C so it appears once for A and once for B? Do you make just a single tweet available to whoever got there first? Or do you make some sort of uber tweet which is for both A and B once they’ve both updated?
We’ve chosen the latter option, which creates a drop down box when you go to reply, giving you a list of accounts to reply from:
That part we’ve solved, and it works great. The part we haven’t entirely solved is filtering. If the tweet comes in first from A but is a mention for B, it is marked as a mention for B, but the UI doesn’t reflect this (ie, no colour change, won’t always jump to the right column) until the UI is forced to update. Sometimes this doesn’t happen unless you toggle edit mode on the appropriate columns!
It’s complex and a unique problem, but we’ll get there eventually.
- Better memory usage
WPF can be a bit of a beast to work with for small memory usage, but we’re finally getting it down to a more respectable figure. It’ll vary with how many accounts you have setup, how many columns you have, and if you clear all streams or not on a regular basis, but we’ve seen 5%-50% less memory usage!
There have also been a huge assortment of bugfixes, too many to list.
MahTweets Website
The MahTweets website has also undergone a huge overhaul!
Hopefully in the near future we’ll add some videos showing off some of our somewhat more hidden features, as well as fleshing out the Features, Developers and the return of the Community Plugins pages.
Future
So what does the future hold for MahTweets? Apart from a few bug fix releases, we’ll be releasing a MahTweets Developer Toolkit as well as reenabling community plugins – this will all happen under "2.7". For the next major version (2.8), we’ve not nailed down what extra features we want. However, we’ll hope to have
- Video uploading (Vimeo, Facebook, Flickr, Viddler, YouTube)
- More plugins for Url shortening and Status Handling
- Synchronising settings between computers
There is also the strong possibility that we’ll look into creating MahTweets for Android, now that I have a HTC Dream (thanks Will!)
