Twittia in JavaScript

2011-09-19T22:01:51Z

I have my own Twitter client Twittia which I am using and sometimes working on. The first version was written in RubyCocoa but the code was a mess so I have rewritten the whole thing mostly in JavaScript.

The only thing which I wasn't able to write in JavaScript was the OAuth authentication which Twitter requires, back then (1,5 years ago or so) I used a Objective-C class instead to do the initial authentication and posting tweets. Then about a year ago I was able to fix the posting tweets to rewrite in JavaScript but the initial authentication was still just magic to me in JavaScript, I just didn't understand how to do it.

Last weekend I found Tweet Marker which is a service where you can set and get your "last read" tweet for a given Twitter user and I decided to implement it, I even got a API-key, but when I had a look at the documentation I found out that it is too working with OAuth and I would have a hard time implementing it, mostly because I didn't understand it even enough to implement the normal Twitter-authentication in JavaScript and I really didn't want to write that too in Objective-C.

So today after work I decided that it was time to just fix it. And what do you say, after "just" 8 hours of work everything reasonable is now written in JavaScript and I was able to delete a external framework and a bunch of Objective-C files.

Now I am seriously thinking about porting Twittia to Linux and Windows because I only have to do a simple GUI and bind it to the JavaScript code and I'm done! All the difficult parts are written in JavaScript.

The new version is not out yet because I want to test it for some days on my own before i release it but it looks like this: