Adium

Archive for the ‘Twitter’ Category

Adium 1.5.7 released

Tuesday, July 2nd, 2013

We are happy to announce the release of Adium 1.5.7. Changes include the update of Twitter support and the removal of StatusNet support. Update via “Check For Updates” from the “Adium” menu or download 1.5.7 here. You can find the full list of changes here.

Updated Twitter support
We are glad to report that the required changes to continue our Twitter support have been finished with the release of Adium 1.5.7. Thanks to Frank Dowsett we are now using STTwitter, which supports version 1.1 of Twitter’s API. While this means the core of Adium’s Twitter support has been completely rewritten, transition should be automatic and quick. You will also notice some extra features like better support for displaying retweets and expanding t.co links.

StatusNet support dropped
Sadly, dropping support for version 1.0 of that API also caused us to lose support for StatusNet. Our statistics indicate only a handful of people used this feature, and considering StatusNet is deprecated in favor of pump.io we decided to not put any effort in adding StatusNet support to STTwitter. If you want us to add pump.io support, we invite you to upvote our ticket #16380. And if a contributor were to step forward and add pump.io support, that would be all the more welcome.

Continued support for Twitter in Adium

Wednesday, March 6th, 2013

Twitter announced a while ago they will retire version 1 of their API this year. This means applications that interface with Twitter using this method, like Adium does, will stop working. They have begun some so-called “blackout tests” where certain functions stop working in applications relying on API version 1. Users reported that sending Twitter direct messages (DMs) from Adium didn’t work temporarily. According to Twitter, we will be seeing more and more of these temporary blackout tests.[1][2]

Adium support for Twitter was initially added in version 1.4, released in 2010. Aside from some bug fixes, it hasn’t seen many changes since. Twitter support has been good enough for quite a few people (including many current and former Adium developers) to keep it in Adium.

Twitter’s plans have made us consider the future of our support for Twitter. Fortunately, our very own Frank Dowsett has stepped up and will make the changes required to keep Twitter working in Adium. Updated Twitter support is targeted for Adium 1.5.7.

It’s no secret that Twitter has been moving to discourage third-parties from developing Twitter clients. We don’t know what shape this might take in the future, but we do know that many of you use, and even enjoy the ability to interact with Twitter via Adium. We will do our best to continue to support it.

Adium 1.4.3

Sunday, September 4th, 2011

Adium 1.4.3 is now available. For the full list of changes and all the gory details see the release notes.

Here are a few of the more prominent changes:

Facebook Chat
Facebook will now connect via the officially-sanctioned mechanism (Facebook page on the API).  You no longer have to provide Adium with your username and password; when you first log in, you will be prompted to authenticate via a facebook.com window. Existing Facebook Chat accounts are upgraded automatically.

MSN
We reverted Adium 1.4.2’s change to libpurple’s MNP16 support from MSNP15. This should fix direct file transfers, user icons, and receiving custom emoticons, while disabling multiple points of presence (MPOP). We determined that this was the better trade-off based on user feedback.

Other important changes
We also fixed Twitter connectivity for many, a common crash, and activated the overlay scrollers for Lion.

Support and development
As always, if you find a bug or have a question, please refer to the Help page.

…And if you’d like to help us out in any way, feel free to find out how you can contribute.

 

Onward to 1.5!

Birds of a feather

Sunday, March 8th, 2009

For well over a year now, Twitter has been an often-requested addition to our repertoire of services. As a user of the service I absolutely understand. The current base of Twitter clients often leave something to be desired, behave in a weird way, or just add an additional application you need to keep open.

Fear not! Using Matt Gemmell‘s MGTwitterEngine, a library used to communicate with the Twitter API, I’ve managed to make what I consider to be a very good Twitter client into Adium. Your friends (people you follow) are displayed in a group on the Contact List: adding or removing will follow or unfollow them, and chatting with them will send (or receive) direct messages. Note that you can only send a direct message to someone who follows you, so it might be a one-way conversation.

twitter-full

A group chat named “Timeline (username)” (you can rename it like I have above) will appear alongside your Twitter contacts. When new tweets arrive, this group chat will open; you can close it to help keep your place in the tweets, or leave it open and watch them arrive. Of course, the check interval is customizable (between never checking and checking every hour), and you can force an update through the chat’s context menu. There’s also an option to automatically update tweets when you send one.

When an incoming tweet is a reply to one of yours, the message style you are using will highlight the message for you. I’m going to be modifying all of the message styles included in Adium to support this (it’s been around for group chats since 1.3 was released, but not many have added it). You can also set an Event to fire when a reply comes in: display a growl notification, play a sound, whatever floats your boat!

You can get information on any of your Twitter contacts, and their biographical information (with links to friends, followers, and updates) and their latest 20 statuses will be loaded.

twitter-getinfo

Next to every Tweet is a set of action links. “original” will go to the post which the tweet is replying to, “link” will go to the permanent link for the status, and the “reply” link will set up a reply like below. The “@” character next to the character count indicates that the Tweet you are sending is replying to a specific tweet.

twitter-reply-input

If you come across a tweet online, you can open the “Reply to a Tweet” window, which lets you either enter the username and status ID, or paste the twitter.com URL to fill in the information. This makes replying to tweets other people reference a great deal easier! For example, if I didn’t click the “reply” link for Ryan’s status above, I could paste the Twitter.com URL into the window and see something like this:

twitter-reply-window

My goal has been to integrate the service seamlessly into the Adium experience, and I think I’m meeting or exceeding my own expectations. However, I’m definitely open for suggestions which could go in before this is released. There’s still a few bugs to iron out, a few things to finish up, and a few new ideas which are bound to pop into my head. We also need to beat Twitter into submission about giving us a service identifier.

I’ve got a fun few ideas for ways Adium could save you time and effort, like automatically uploading images you insert into a message (like you would a direct IM on AIM) to Twitpic. This will largely depend on how much time and effort are available before Adum 1.4 is released (hopefully in the next few months we’ll see a beta!) and how many insane stints of programming I can slip in between now and then.