Wednesday, July 16, 2014

TwittAmiga V4 Twitter Client for AmigaOS4 on X1000

Today I wanted to take a quick look at the recently released TwittAmiga V4.0 Twitter Client by Oliver Urbann for AmigaOS4 on X1000.


I was surprised to see this release on os4depot.net and quickly rushed to download it here. It is also able to run on AmigaOS3 and MorphOS.

I have been keen for a GUI based Twitter Client for AmigaOS4 and now it is here!

This is the folder once extracted (I put it into the Sys:Internet folder):


The Readme explains the system requirements like various MUI Classes and OpenURL which I already had installed on my X1000. (you can get these from os4depot.net)

In addition, it explains that the Twitter client configuration is done via Tooltypes on the TwittAmiga-AmigaOS4.info icon, and explains what options there are (click to expand):


So I viewed the Information for the TwittAmiga-AmigaOS4 icon, and could see the configurable parameters as below:


I modified the Account to the Twitter account I have, and the password, which I really don't think should be listed in plain text here to be honest, but for testing I wanted to try it out.

I also modified the tweets_per_page to 15, although I changed it to more later on.

Once you save these, and then launch the TwittAmiga client, you get a window like below. Note that you need to click on Home for the initial login to occur and your twitter feed to be visible like below:


At the top of the window if a text editor area where you can compose your tweets, or use the area for searching tweets or the map. As you can see the map shows the location listed for the different tweeter accounts I am following that are listed in the 15 items in the feed.

A map is shown the right showing the location of the twitter accounts showing in my feed, and the status bar and progress bar are at the bottom.

Below shows me entering a tweet:


I then click Send, and after hitting Reload it appears in my feed:


You will notice that web links in tweets are clickable (double click), which launches the link using OpenURL (using whatever your default browser is set to in Open URL - available to configure in the Prefs folder) - in my case is Odyssey.

Below is a link I clicked from a tweet in TwittAmiga and the Odyssey browser showing the page shortly after that (click to expand):


You can remove the Map from being visible from the title bar menu (you can also stop it appearing altogether from the tool types in the icon for TwittAmiga if you never want to see it - not having the map makes the client smaller is easier to have floating around the screen:


For each tweet you have three icons you can press, to Retweet the tweet yourself, to stop following this person's twitter feed, and to view the information about this person doing this particular twitter feed. (The descriptions appear when hovering the mouse over the icons)

I then selected the Information icon (third from the left) to see the information about the Akihabara News twitter account which also shows their recent tweets too:


Here is Adam Liaw's information on twitter - he was the winner of Masterchef Australia a few years ago - he is originally from Adelaide, worked in Tokyo, married a woman from there and now lives in Sydney, presenting a number of food shows for local TV station SBS here in Australia:


If I now bring the map back, so it is visible again:


You will notice there is a zoom slider above the map that allows me to zoom into the Google map, and also to search for a particular place, like Tokyo as in this example:


While mucking around with this I also came across this guy in Australia on Twitter trying to sell an old beat up Holden Barina car - with a very slick advertising video he did on YouTube. Very interesting, and original way to sell such a rubbish car. I viewed it in SMTube and also Odyssey (click to expand) - AmigaOS4 is great:



Have to admit I do like this TwittAmiga program a lot, and clearly it does quite a lot of things well.

I am keen to use it more. Some areas I would like to see improved in the next release is removing the clear text password field in tool types in favour of a hashed username/password file, the search user/tweet functions working a bit better (sometimes I get Unauthorised access - try restarting).  Being able to upload photos in tweets would be great too. An auto update of the feed would be great, and being able to get the feed updates as a dockie pop-up would be brilliant!

I am quite impressed though with what has already been achieved with this TwittAmiga, very glad to have a twitter client GUI on AmigaOS4, and look forward to more updates of this program into the future - certainly worth trying out on your X1000!

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