TweetBox Web Start

You can jump right into TweetBox through this link. You can trust the application to not do anything malicious. The first time, Tweetbox will ask you for your Twitter credentials. They will be stored locally on your PC in your default user folder in a file named tweetbox.properties. Note that the password is not encrypted. After entering your twitter login name and password, you should see tweets arriving.

Tweetbox does not take the health of the Twitter API into account yet. It just doesn't care and tries to get new tweets every 5 minutes no matter how the API is feeling. Not that I am an egoistic person, I just didn't get around dealing with Twitter's fragility yet.

You wil also notice that TweetBox is very sluggish. I have already used the builtin profiler of Netbeans 6.5 (which is absolutely awesome!!) and managed to make TweetBox about 210% faster, but it still sluggish. I am starting to think that JavaFX is to blame, since I think I have already taken quite a few optimization measures such as building a caching image loader and reducing complexity of UI structure where I could.

Anyway, have fun playing with TweetBox and feel free to drop some comments, either here on my blog, or on twitter. I can be followed here.

By the way, Jim Weaver mentions TweetBox on his blog. Thanks Jim, much appreciated!

TweetBox migrated to JavaFX 1.0

It took me forever (mainly because I had to do it in my rare spare time), but I have finally "ported" my TweetBox project to the JavaFX 1.0 SDK. I wish this article on how to migrate to the new SDK was posted sooner!

Anyway, it is ported and I have a new version ready for download here.

You will see that I have also been tweaking the UI. The features are still mostly the same.
It is functional, but still not very sophisticated. I have also managed to make the links in the tweets clickable. Links should open in your default browser. I have used this as the basis for doing that.

Let me know what you think of it.