Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
Hi Everyone! Whilst I've been busy coding away, Dan has set up this lovely Posterous based blog so I can keep people informed about the latest changes to JournoTwit. Kind of makes sense – right?
Today's release has been over a month in the making and has had a lot more changed that meets the eye. Although visually it's not drastic, you should find faster and more stable than ever before.
You'll notice we have moved away from having a text link menu and you can now access options using icons on the menu bar. This should make things a little easier when on mobile phones. You'll see the Search icon as something new – this is a quick and easy way of creating a new column and once you start using it – you'll wonder how you ever did without it. More on using this on the help page.
Google Translation support has been added, for those that follow non-English speaking people. This can be done on a per tweet basis, automatically for everything – or for a particular users column. This is currently only translating to English – but expect much more development on this aspect in the near future.
As I've explained before, the colour schemes used in JournoTwit are mathematically derived from a single colour. However, this isn't always perfect – especially when the icons are a fixed colour. So there is now an option to match the icon shades to the theme. I'm not a big fan – but several of you are already using it, so...
The AJAX calls have been improved, so will cope much better with flaky connections – especially on mobile phones. In general, mobile performance is significantly better, although we've primarily been testing on the N97.
Black listing has been upgraded so it's not just for #hashtags now. You can black list a phrase, or even people (my favourite!).
By popular demand, there is now an “in reply to” link that fetches the tweet and adds it into the column. It's smart enough to check your current feeds first – so if it's on the page somewhere already – it'll be instant with no API calls!
Another big change is the use of the tweet action bar – there is no longer an @reply/DM button on every tweet – but rather a +. Click this and an action bar comes up below the tweet, allowing you to perform several actions. This might seem a little annoying at first because of the extra click, but it declutters a lot, improves performance and allows us to add many more actions at a later point without worrying about the space it takes up.
There are dozens of minor improvements, bug fixes and changes just waiting to be found and we are now in a much stronger position to develop further features.
A big thanks to all the Edge testers – you are truly amazing! Without them, this wouldn't be such a stable and exciting release :)
