Today marks the release of DestroyTwitter 1.4 Beta. This major release includes the most features and fixes out of all the releases to date. Just as 1.3 helped move DestroyTwitter into the 10,000+ install count, 1.4 will bring the count to 20,000+ before the week is through. Let’s dive right into what’s new.
The most requested feature this time around was the ability to specify which users appear in the Home canvas. After a lot of planning and designing, I decided on a set of preferences called Rules. At the moment, this set consists of Include, Exclude, and Links. The first two are lists of users that can be added to in a number of ways. There’s a plus sign to the right of the text that prompts the Quick Friend Lookup and there are also key shortcuts, Cmd+Shift+I/E (Mac) and Ctrl+Shift+I/E (PC), that do the same. The third rule is Links. This rule displays only tweets that contain links.
Along with using Quick Friend Lookup, users can also be added to the lists from the tweet canvases. With a tweet selected, pressing I/E adds the tweet’s sender to the Include and Exclude list respectively. An alert appears notifying that the user has been added or that he/she is already in the list.
When a rule is activated, a subheader appears aside the Home canvas’s header. The rules can be activated and deactivated in the Preferences canvas or with key shortcuts. The shortcuts to switch between rules are Cmd+Option+A/I/E/L (Mac) and Ctrl+Alt+A/I/E/L (PC) for All, Include, Exclude, and Links respectively.
There are a number of additions to the preferences in 1.4. Under Tweet/Message, options to display users’ real names, twenty-four hour time, and use an alternate retweet marker are available. The alternate retweet marker replaces the RT prefix with the greater-than symbol (>) in order to save an extra character. Under Notifications, a preference to disable home notifications has been added. This allows the user to only have notifications from the Replies and Messages canvases. Lastly, a Debug section is at the bottom to clear icon cache, regular cache, and preferences. This should primarily be used for troubleshooting.
In addition to preferences, a number of new key shortcuts will make using DestroyTwitter even easier. Along with the ones mentioned previously, here is the new list, which can also be found in the documentation page.
DestroyTwitter’s Replies canvas now retrieves tweets that aren’t prefixed with the username. It also does this in page format in order to save memory. In the Search canvas, focusing the input prompts a search history that displays the last ten keywords. To remove a keyword, simply click it while holding Option (Mac) / Alt (PC).
Finally, the long list of fixes. The right arrow hotkey is now disabled for non-reply tweets so error messages don’t appear. The autoupdate icon presence is fixed to disappear when the progress bar appears. The Dialogue panel is fixed to show for tweet’s from locked users. The only issue now is that for those tweets, an API call is used. All other non-locked tweets don’t use calls. The bug that marks the first tweet as read when pressing the up arrow key is fixed. The user’s tweets in the Search canvas are now marked as read automatically. Hash tags have been fixed to not link numbers. The Account canvas and Tweet/Dialogue panel icon issue is fixed. HTML entities convert to the desired character. On Mac, the toggle button click area now highlights only when the mouse is not over the resize area. Quick Friend Lookup is fixed to work with non-English keyboards where @ is not shift+2. The unclickable bug that froze everything is fixed. Drag and drop is now delayed half a second for when files are dragged over the window and not intended for dropping.
That’s everything. Phew. It’s been a solid two weeks since the last major release and I’ll be getting to work on 1.5 soon. In the meantime, download DestroyTwitter, spread the word.
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