Growleet alpha is alive! (Super-minimalist Twitter app)
The tiny little Twitter app that is working on my desktop right now… it is beautiful! The best thing about it: like all other things I make, this one christened 'Growleet' gets out of the way and lets me focus on what I want to do.
Let me explain why I needed another desktop Twitter app when we have the big guns like Tweetdeck and Twitter for Mac already out there.
Reason 1: I don't want a big gun. Okay, that's not a good enough reason… why don't I want the 'real' clients? Reason 2: I don't want to engage in conversations when I'm working. Reason 3: I want to keep an eye on what's going on in my timeline. Reason 4: I want realtime desktop notifications so I don't miss out on something important. Reason 5: When I'm busy, i don't want the the notifications to distract me. Reason 6: I want to block tweets containing certain words or from certain users - temporarily. Reason 7: I want to keep certain tweets on desktop till I click and dismiss them, like my mentions or interesting hashtags. Reason 8: I do not want these 'sticky' notifications to attract attention, no bouncing icons, no sounds. Reason 9: I want to be able to automatically block trending topics and hashtags, as they change. Reason 10: I want to change settings for blocking/ watching tweets VERY easily.
So there, none of the available Twitter clients fit my criteria. Hence this exercise. However, the most important reason why I'm doing this is because I want to keep testing the Twitter library I'm using with Hiwaybot for any bugs and fix them before they appear on the server.
Anyway, long story short: here's some nice pics for teasers… and this app is hereby called 'Growleet'. As in Growl - the notification app for Mac and some letters from 'Tweet'. Also, you could read the 'leet' as elite and massage that ego a bit :-P
The main User Interface is a small icon on the System Menu, and a tiny menu slides out on clicking it.
Since I have not added any functionality to post tweets from Growleet, the first option "Twitter" takes you to the website (I have currently added mobile version's link) so a tweet can be posted. It is cumbersome to discourage tweeting when working.
Settings is to add or remove any watch-words or block-words. If a tweet contains a watch-word, it stays on desktop till clicked. And if a tweet contains block-word, it won't show up in the notifications at all.
And finally, the Growl notifications…
Each tweet shows up for 10 seconds before fading out (the appearance, position and sound alerts can be configured separately in Growl preference pane)
And finally… the debug version… showing the guts of the app…
This won't be seen once the app is fully ready and packaged as Mac App. If and when I come around to do that… I am not sure. Because it still has lot of rough edges, some of which are inherited from Twitter library (tweepy) that crashes on ill-formatted tweets. No point in making an app that just stops displaying tweets without warning.
Quick Note: Growleet uses PyQt4, which is not a trivial dependency. It is definitely not suitable for everyone, using Growleet can lead to major frustration if you are used to tweeting a lot. I'm facing it right now. But, it's a bitter medicine I need to be productive. *sigh*