Twit World Report: Presentation mode, shortening URLs, and more!

Friday, June 19, 2009

Presentation mode, shortening URLs, and more!

In the Apple spirit (Snow Leopard) we have been working on refining Twitterfall recently, improving some of the backend, optimising the code, and improving some of the user interface and experience. We have a few cool things to share with you today.

Firstly, Presentation Mode. We try to focus on all use cases when improving Twitterfall, and we know that a lot of people love to use Twitterfall at conferences to display the back channel, but sometimes 'Hide Panels' just isn't enough - you want to show JUST the tweets, in big text, and nothing else. That's why we've added 'Presentation Mode' to the list of themes, which automatically hides the panels, removes the top panel, and makes the text nice and big. Perfect for projecting onto a big screen.

Next, and possibly the most obvious, we have revamped a lot of the default theme. Now we have new icons, a cleaner look, and we've removed the performance-sucking translucent PNGs that were really reducing the visual performance of Twitterfall. Now, by default, everyone can enjoy a much smoother Twitterfall experience. We're open to suggestions and comments about the new theme, and of course all the old themes are still present (minus 'Simple', which this theme is replacing). Transitions to the new theme should be painless.

My favourite new addition, is the built in URL shortener. Now when composing a new tweet, reply, DM, or retweet, you have the option of shortening your URLs for maximum tweet-length efficiency, and without having to leave Twitterfall! The replacements are performed 'in-place', which means you just have to type your tweet out as normal, and then hit 'Shorten URLs'. We're considering this in 'beta', as we're still ironing out any bugs, but we're really excited to provide this feature, and hope you find it useful. Currently we support is.gd and have no plans to support any others, but we'll see how it goes.