@wohali

Glad you like it.

This is my understanding of the rate limiting put in place by Twitter - "Clients are allowed 70 requests per 60 sixty minute time period, starting from their first request.  This is enough to make just over one request per minute, per hour, which should meet the needs of most applications.  Rate limiting applies only to authenticated API requests; requests for the public timeline do not count"

So is your widget getting loaded more than once a minute ?

I only make 1 call on load either to the public timeline or friends timeline based on authentication status (this will get 20 statuses in 1 call). I also make a separate call if you click on a user staus to get the userstimeline (also up to 20 statuses). When you click back from a user's timeline, I use the same 20 statuses from the inital load, so there shouldn't be any more server calls there....

I am happy to make modifications if required, but I need to know a bit more about how you are using the widget. If you really did want in widget limiting, would you disallow a user to make a server call if they were going to go over the 1 call a minute limit (for say a 5 min period), but had not yet gone over the full 70 calls per hour. I am open to suggestions on how to limit without being annoying or restrictive.

Cheers

Hey There- I *love* the widget, and especially love the birdie animations on it! The typography on it though, is very difficult to read, and could be way improved. I could mock something up and post it in a coupla days if'n you'd want suggestions... tho otherwise, it's text stuff is my only criticism. Second to the legibility, mine renders spaces and commas with markup... which also compromises legibility.

Very fun, and very cute (as Chumby and Twitter both all about!).

As an aside, if you want to do a screen capture on the chumby itself, you can SSH into the device, then do:

# imgtool --mode=cap --fb=0 /tmp/capture.jpg

This will capture the image of the current widget.  This is useful if you're getting different appearances on the chumby than on the Virtual Chumby. Of course, you can capture directly to a USB dongle as well.

To capture a Control Panel image, you need to set --fb=1.

For more on imgtool, do:

# imgtool -h

Correct. I'll work on doin' some screengrabs thru Virtual Chumby, and will post them here.

Yeah... the "issue" with monospaced fonts, is that they're just not legible.

The aesthetic of old typewriters and telegraph machines really involves more of a Courier font, and also involves a lot of "random" irregularities programmed into the font, to present the illusion of keys not being depressed all the way, ink not rolling onto the letters fully, etc. This of course isn't at all legible, either.

The primary aesthetic of the Tweeter screen, imho, is the adorable little "peekaboo!" birdie shouting the message-bubble. To me, that captures everything about Twitter, beautifully, and without compromise to performance or legibility. The monospaced font looks almost like the app didn't load fully, and is having font-rendering issues... tho more relevant, it's just plain hard to read. Looking at a Twitter page in my browser, I can easily scan up and down the page, no problem... and it takes me at least 3x as long to read each message on Tweeter, as it does on Twitter.

In a small footprint like Chumby's screen provides, you really have to strike a very careful balance between "expressive" aesthetics, and thoughtfully executed functional bits that have to be discoverable, functional (if a control), and legible. If just the right few things are done expressively, with everything else just focussing on doing the job at hand as efficiently as possible, the user's focus all goes to the one key bit of expressed playfulness... the use of the api is seamlessly cognitively-absorbed, and everyone is happy.

Anyhoo- just additional clarification. I'll shut the hell up, and produce some mocks to put my pixels where my mouth is, before jabbering design blather any further...

I'll have a look at the next / previous controls - I think it is a good idea. I was/am unsure how many people actually interacted with their Chumby regularly once they choose their desired widgets and customised them.

I need to do some fixes to some text rendering (some quotes and things coming through escaped as discussed in previous posts)

I'll make a note in the description when I make these changes.

Cheers,
Aran

@wohali - I'm still trying to find some time to add the desired functionality as discussed above.

Timeout errors - I think I have the timeout set pretty high (30 sec from memory), so I don;t know if I can do much about that, but glad you aren;t getting the max hots errors any more. UNfortunately that is set by Twitter, and you have to write to them for a special case exception if you want more requests per minute.

Embedded fonts - I replied on your other post. I think Duane already pointed you in the right direction though....

Cheers,
Aran