![]() ![]() The unfortunate truth? Not even the developers know. So what’s going on here? Why has it taken two years for any more news of the update? When will the new version finally be available? The developers have noted that the 5.0 update for Mac is facing big delays. Three days shy of a year after releasing the iPhone update, however, users were given what is currently the app’s most recent update. The Iconfactory, Twitterrific’s developers, promised that a Mac version of the updated app was in development and would include support for the new iCloud syncing feature and an all-new design. In December 2012, Twitterrific 5 was released for iOS devices. It’s currently on its fourth major version. To this day it remains a popular choice among users and has seen many major updates and redesigns. It was also the first app to use the word “tweet” to refer to the posts on the network, and introduced many modern staples like conversations and replies. Twitterrific has been around for quite a while now, and was the very first native Twitter application ever built for Mac. Right below Twitter for Mac you’ll find Twitterrific. You may recognize the official Twitter app along with some of the most popular and prolific third-party clients. You can’t just slap a button on the screen for every feature that could conceivably be used at any given time.If you open the Mac App Store right now and do a search for “twitter,” you’ll find results just like the ones in the image above. Some features are only of interest to so-called “power users”, so they’re left subtle, spread by word-of-mouth. Some features you try to make invisible and heuristic. Some features are added just to solve one influential user’s problem. Some features are, ah, accidental.Ī sufficiently mature, popular, and interesting product thus tends to accumulate a small pile of hidden features, sometimes not documented or even officially acknowledged. I’d say this is actually a good thing! Using something for a while should absolutely reward you with a new trick every so often - that below-the-surface knowledge makes you feel involved with the thing you’re using and makes it feel deeper overall. On one end of the spectrum you have tools like Notepad, where the only easter egg is that pressing F5 inserts the current time. On the other end you have tools like vim, which consist exclusively of easter eggs. One of Twitter’s problems is that it’s tilted a little too far towards the vim end of the scale. It looks like a dead-simple service, but those humble 140 characters have been crammed full of features over the years, and the ways they interact aren’t always obvious. There are rules, and the rules generally make sense once you know them, but it’s also really easy to overlook them. Here, then, is a list of all the non-obvious things about Twitter that I know. Consider it both a reference for people who aren’t up to their eyeballs in Twitter, and an example of how these hidden features can pile up. I’m also throwing in a couple notes on etiquette, because I think that’s strongly informed by the shape of the platform. Tweets are limited to 140 Unicode characters, meaning that even astral plane characters (such as emoji) only count as one. Leading and trailing whitespace is stripped from tweets. Tweets may contain newlines, and there doesn’t seem to be any limit to how many. In the middle of a tweet, strings of whitespace (e.g. However, more than two consecutive newlines will be reduced to only two.Īnything remotely resembling a link will be mangled into some link-shortened garbage. ![]() In some cases, such as when talking about a domain name, this can make the tweet longer. You can defeat this by sticking an invisible character, such as U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER, around the final dot so it no longer looks like a domain name. ![]() In official clients, links are shown unmangled, but without the protocol and truncated to about 20 characters. The link to this article, for example, shows as eev.ee/blog/…. However, at least on Web Twitter, copy-pasting preserves the link in full, including protocol. Note that Twitter’s knowledge of domains is not exhaustive - it will link “” but not “eev.ee”.įor the sake of its SMS-based roots, Twitter supports performing several commands by typing them in a tweet. In particular, if you start a tweet with the word d or m or dm, the second word will be treated as a username, and the rest of the tweet will be DM’d to that user. ![]()
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