AK's weblog

Less than two weeks ago, I announced project "bacon bird". And today is the day where I can be proud to announce to first release of baconbird, my new twitter client for text terminals.

Baconbird, much like my previous successful project newsbeuter (an RSS/Atom RSS feedreader for those who haven't heard about it yet), targets people who tend to work on text terminals (using mutt, irssi, slrn, vim, etc. is a strong indicator for that), uses the fabulous STFL as its user interface library, and was created to scratch an itch. My itch in this case was Twitter's switch from basic authentication to OAuth, which had the negative side effect that it rendered all (authenticated) RSS feeds practically unusable, so I was stuck to using the web interface of Twitter, which I wasn't too happy about. Also, other Twitter clients were either slow, had weird user interfaces, or were simply CPU and memory hogs. And then there was the infamous Twitter XSS worm that affected quite a few people. All these things together brought me to the conclusion that I had to change something about that.

At first, I started hacking on another client, but soon I found out that the purely ncurses-based UI is virtually unmaintainable, and so I decided to do it right instead and write my very own thing. And that's how baconbird was born. The code itself is about 850 SLOCs of Perl code, the user interface is based on STFL, the Twitter backend uses Net::Twitter, and all the OO glue code in between uses the Moose object system. All in all it took me less than 2 weeks of my free time to develop the first version of it.

So, what features does baconbird offer? Not too much, so far, but enough for a start and to show it off. Of course, you can view the time line (i.e. all the tweets of you and the people you follow), your mentions, your direct messages, and searches. It reloads continuously, and takes care about the current rate limit as imposed by Twitter. You can post tweets, reply to tweets (it even tracks the status ID, i.e. in the web interface you can see proper "in reply to" links), retweet, send direct messages, reply to direct messages, and when writing tweets, you can even have your URLs shortened (I implemented integration with is.gd).

My personal favorite is the search feature, though, I can search for a certain word or hashtag, and I get a nifty live stream of the latest tweets on that. I can even switch to my timeline and switch back, and the live stream keeps on loading as soon as its view is active, until I switch to another view or start another search.

Baconbird is far from complete, though. I still need to implement subscription management, and everything else the Twitter API has to offer (as long as its applicable from a terminal application). I'm also glad to implement your feature requests. And last, but not least, if you like baconbird and to support its further development, I'd be happy about flattring it. You can also flattr this article, of course (</shameless-plug>).