I love Twitterlex. It’s a Mac OS X Dashboard widget, and the main interface I use to send tweets. However, I didn’t like the fact that it did not highlight links in the tweet list! So I created a modified version (without authorization from the author, mind you) that does just that!
For those interested, I modified the twitterlex.js file inside the widget, adding new functions beginning on line 146. You can download it from here! I repeat: I am not the original author of the code, just a shameless coder who likes to see how things work. Have fun!
Update, 2008-01-31: New version with some enhancements:
- Removed “title” attributes, which created tooltips that sometimes remained on screen after clicking a link;
- Fixed the “"” text that appeared when a tweet had… well, quotes;
- Reduced the height of the text field;
- Fixed a small bug: when sending a long tweet, the orange and red warnings (about excessive message length) did not disappear;
- Added a small space between the tweet author and the message text using CSS instead of adding a plain ” ” in the code.
Update, 2008-01-31: New version with more enhancements, plus a security fix:
- Highlights “@username” links in the text, linking to the Twitter home page of the user;
- Fixes a recently found security threat caused by using eval(); now the script uses JSON.parse() instead.
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8 Comments
01.23.2008
j’aimerais bien la même chose pour mon blog,mais bon pas prio….
01.26.2008
Nice… found this after downloading twitterlex, and your tweaks are essential to usability. Did you send a patchfile to the original author? Maybe he’d include your improvements.
01.28.2008
Hi David :) Thanks for the comments. I am happy that you found this useful. I will send the modifications to the author, who knows! He might as well use them. It’s not perfect though – I’ve realized there are a couple of URLs that appear badly formatted… I should take some time to fix that! But when!?!?!? :))
04.04.2008
it seems that one of the main bugs that bothered me in the original is worse than ever in your edit. The bug in question is the one where it will not show any tweets in the widget. With the original, I can fix this simply by restarting the widget and logging in again, this does not seem to be the case with your update. Thanks for taking the time to do this, as it really does add a load of functionality to this widget.
04.04.2008
@skooj sorry if the widget does not work for you, as I’ve only used in my own computer, which does not constitute an extensive testing strategy at all.
04.04.2008
lol, it’s really quite alright, I was just pointing out that there may be a problem for others. the other release found in the main comments seems to work just fine, it’s just that the layout was changed quite a bit (aka dashes after usernames) on that one. I may do a bit of sniffing later if time allows, but it’s not looking that i’ll have time to do anything myself.
once again, thanks for doing this =D
08.03.2009
I tried your version of twitterlex, but it doesn’t work for me. It gets an exception:
03/08/2009 18:24:08 [0x0-0x7007].com.apple.dock[132] 2009-08-03 18:24:08.903 DashboardClient[183:10b] (com.webfroot.widget.twitterlex) file:///Users/piet/Library/Widgets/Twitterlex.wdgt/json2.js: parseJSON (line: 269)
The original doesn’t work for me either but I don’t even get a message.
This is on Leopard, 10.5.7.
Also there is no ~/Library/Preferences/widget-com.webfroot.widget.twitterlex.plist, which I would expect.
08.03.2009
Hi Piet,
Thanks for your comments! I haven’t updated (nor used) TwitterLex since early last year… probably the Twitter API has changed, and the current version does not work any more. I don’t plan to support this widget anymore.
Sorry!
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