Syrinx 2.0 alpha
My blog has been eerily quiet of late, always a good sign that I’m hard at work coding. Syrinx 2.0 promises to be well worth the effort, but it has been a long road. Gone is the NSCollectionView of Syrinx 1.x, in it’s place is an NSTableView full of custom cells. This will address the largest usability issue: Syrinx slows down when it gets several hundred or more tweets. The newest alpha version I have tested with over 1600 tweets and it does not suffer any loss of speed. Viewing conversations, which I feel really separates Syrinx from the other Twitter apps is also much faster thanks to the table implementation. Besides speed, the table uses significantly less memory, making Syrinx a better citizen to be running full time on your system.
The UI is also seeing slight changes. Fewer boxes, a few drop shadows and a more efficient use of screen space to fit more tweets in the window.
And new features: I’ve even found time to put in some new features. These will include URL shortening, retweeting and full out searching of Twitter. I’m looking forward to Syrinx 2.0 as being a new foundation to build even better features off, and I have a few in mind that will really enhance the user experience.
For now, back to coding so I can get this out to everyone.
Great news! I’m looking forward to giving it a try.
Though, if I could be so bold as to make a comment/suggestion, there’s only one feature that’s been keeping me from using Syrinx full-time.
When I am reading tweets, I am almost always doing it exclusively through the keyboard. The little feature that keeps me with Twitteriffic is that the keyboard shortcut which opens all the links in the active tweet in my browser. That lets me stay on the keyboard, and not hunt for the link(s) with the pointer.
A small thing, but it makes the difference for me. Good luck finishing up!
-Mike
I’m really excited about Syrinx 2.0!! Syrinx is the only Twitter client I’ve been able to stick with and I can’t wait to see the new features. Great work!
@Mike – I have just added the ability to open links from the keyboard, it will be in version 2.0.
@Dana – Thanks!
If you bookmark a particular tweet, have a configuration option to have the book automatically select the tweet just past the bookmark.
That would allow you to “book” past a bunch of tweets by repeatedly hitting the bookmark kbd shortcut. This will also work very well with the launch shortcut you just added.
@floatingbones
It would also be great to have a “float window” option that would keep the Syrinx window on top. This would allow you to blast through a bunch of tweets fast without having Syrinx get buried every time you launched the URLs in a tweet.
Scrivener is one app that does the float thing: a checkbox under Window -> Float Window has the main window float on top.
@floatingbones – You can use spacebar to bookmark and select the next tweet. I think that’s the functionality you are looking for. Also, in the upcoming version using the keyboard shortcut for opening URLs will open the links in the background, leaving the focus on Syrinx.
Yep. I think you’ve got it spot on. That will do exactly what I want.
Thanks!
Hi, I’ve been using Syrinx for a couple of weeks, and it’s definitely my favorite OS X Twitter app so far. Just came by to make a minor feature request, I really like how you can change all the colors independently, the only problem is that the links are always blue, and they don’t do well on dark backgrounds. So it would be sweet if you added a color setting for links and @ replies.
Thanks for making this app and keeping it free!
@Wasyl – I haven’t figured out how to change the link colors yet, but I’ll keep looking.
Mickey, I am loving Syrinx after trying loads of other OSX clients. Great work !
Just a couple of thoughts -
When my Macbook awakes from sleep, I seem to have lost all but the last few tweets that happened whilst it was asleep. Is this just me or does anyone else experience this ?
The only other app that caught my attention when searching was TweetDeck – I love the filtering into groups to try and manage the 100′s to tweets per day plus the replies, but I hate AdobeAir that it’s developed in (slow, memory leaks, hammers CPU so fan on all of the time). Is there any likelihood of you going in the multi-column / filtering direction ? It would make tweet management easier.
Anyhow, keep up the great work – much appreciated. Looking forward to 2.0 !
Another satisfied user here. I tried TweetDeck, as plenty of people seem to use it, but it just didn’t do it for me. Syrinx feels much more Mac-ish!
I’m looking forward to the new features in 2.0, but would like to echo Johnhegs regarding the filtering feature; that is one aspect of TweetDeck that really works for me.
Many thanks.
@Johnhegs – The current version of Syrinx only pulls down up to 20 tweets, 20 replies and 20 direct messages at a time, this is due to a previous limitation on the API that has since gone away. So if you’re MacBook is asleep for more than 20 tweets, some will be lost. Version 2.0 will pull up to 200 of each at a minimum, I may add the ability to pull more. As for the management and grouping of tweets, I have a really great idea for that, and it will be coming soon. It may not make it into 2.0, but it will be soon after.
Will clicking on #keywords in tweets launch the appropriate search in 2.0?
I think part of the infatuation with Tweetdeck is distinct columns for friends, @replies, and DMs.
Will 2.0 have the ability to display multiple windows simultaneously?
Will it be easy to specify that a particular window get some subset of messages: all the DMs, etc?
@FloatingBones – I like the #keywords idea, I’ll add it to my list. 2.0 will not have the ability to display multiple windows.
Syrinx is wonderful, and I’m glad you’ve dealt with the speed issue on cached tweets. Now that Twitter has bought Summize, the #tweet_tag is getting more popular. Would it be possible to have the tags show up as active links, so we can see tweets related to that tag? The other thing, as usual, URL shortening built in. Shouldn’t be too hard to do. All in all, great work.
@Steve – Version 2.0 will have clickable #tags that will open Syrinx search windows for those results. URL Shortening will also be built in.
Could you tweet about your schedule for releasing 2.0? Do some users have the alpha at this point?
@FloatingBones I am currently using the alpha and it’s a HUGE improvement over the current version. I’ve heard rumors that there’s going to be a (public?) beta some time very soon.