Snitter for AIR 1.0

Unfortunately, I haven't had much time to work on Snitter the past few weeks but with the relase of Adobe AIR 1.0 today, I've pushed live a new version that'll work. Head on over and check it out if you haven't already.

Snitter started out as a hobby project, done in my spare time, which has made it hard to respond to bug reports, feature requests, and other general help requests. It sucks as plenty of people have been so supportive of what I've put together. I can only say thank you for your support, morally and financially. It's awesome to see!

The market is getting dense

When I first started Snitter, I knew of Twitterrific but was surprised to find a whole collection of apps out there including a few built on AIR, namely Spaz and Tweetr. It's been interesting to see the progess of these apps and the direction each one has decided to go in. Twhirl came along with plenty of new features, too.

With that said, I've always had a vision for what I wanted to accomplish with Snitter and it's mostly been to scratch a personal itch. The only problem is that my own itch seems to be turning into a rash.

The recent version is halfway to what I've wanted. The coolest thing, in my opinion, is the local storage. Snitter saves every single tweet it receives into a local database. You can then use the filter button to search those old tweets. That's come in handy a few times to find stuff I or somebody else have said.

Another nice feature is the Search Tracking. You can specify a search term in the options and it'll pull in new results. It's like the tracking feature that Twitter offers up but that isn't available except through IM or SMS.

What are the future plans for Snitter?

There's two major features that I still want to incorporate into Snitter. Once this is done, I'll be focusing on bug fixes and attempt to reach an acceptable "beta" level. There's a reason I've called this alpha and it's because things are always changing. I'd definitely like to slow things down and make it as stable as possible.

Increase Local Storage

The next stage to local storage is storing the friends and followers. The biggest problem here is the 70 request limit. I can only pull in records 100 at a time. If you think of somebody like Scoble using the application, with almost 7000 friends and 7000 followers, it'd take 2 hours just to download the data AND he wouldn't be able to do anything else until then.

I'm hoping Twitter will relax on some of the request restrictions to make it easier to maintain this information. Once the data is stored locally, I'll be able to mix up that information in plenty of cool ways including auto-complete, filtering on friends list or followers list, and I want to add tagging, giving users a way to group contacts.

Theme Import

Right now, there's theme support but I have to add in new themes manually. I'd like to include an import tool where you could build and import your own themes. It's just a CSS file (and any associated images), making it really easy to hack up any way you want. Two themes that have turned out well is Milk and Wood which will make an appearance in an upcoming version of Snitter.

Jabber Support

Okay, I know I said two things but this sort of a third feature I'd like to add: Jabber Support. I'll mean I can tie into a user's IM account and receive tweets that way. This means I can avoid the 70 request limit and support Twitter's tracking feature.

Not enough hours in a day

Of course, there's not enough hours in a day and for a project I'm building in my free time, for which I've had very little of these days, it will take some time to get the application to where I want it to be.