TweeTabs
Tutorial
Note: These notes, while not far from the
truth, are not completely synchronous with the
current status of the program. For precise details,
see the
TweeTabs Reference, which is updated more
often.
To get
started with TweeTabs, you should first install the
program and open a Twitter account if you do not
have one already. The program needs a bit of
configuration before the initial call. Once
started, the usage is fairly simple, as explained
below.
- TODO: Explain how to, based on the
Installation section within the
TweeTabs Reference.
- TODO: Package a zip and / or tar.gz
distribution, so git is not required.
TweeTabs
depends on Python, pygtk, twyt (at
least version 0.9.2, some notes within
python-twyt, including a reference for
simplejson).
- TODO: Give some pointers, and a very quick
sketch.
Now suppose
your Twitter user name is My User Name and
your associate Twitter password is
YoullNeverGuessIt. Make sure that you have a
~/.tweetabs directory, maybe by executing
the following commands into a terminal
emulator:
mkdir ~/.tweetabs
Then, using a simple text editor, create a file
named defaults.py in this directory, which
contents should be:
Twitter.user = 'My User Name'
Twitter.password = 'YoullNeverGuessIt'
Of course,
in the above, you ought to replace your user name
and password appropriately. Make sure you keep the
quotes, however.
A final
precaution is to make this file unreadable by
others, because it contains a password. This could
be done with the commands:
chmod 600 ~/.tweetabs/defaults.py
You are now all set for TweeTabs.
TweeTabs
requires a bitmapped display like what is offerred
by the X Windows system on Linux and other Unices.
I merely guess that it should works well under MS
Windows or MacOSX, but the truth is that I do not
know. TweeTabs will definitely not work within a
Linux so-called virtual console.
One way to
launch TweeTabs is to open a terminal emulator
window, and to give the command tweetabs to the shell,
without any arguments. This should quickly open
another window running the TweeTabs
application.
By default,
TweeTabs shows two tabs. One is named Me…
and the other is named Friends. These
normally get loaded with tweets soon after the
program starts. By merely clicking on a tab label,
you switch to displaying the tweets in that tab,
hiding all the tweets in the other tab.
The
Me… tab shows the tweets you recently sent,
as well as the replies you might have received from
others. The Friends tab shows all recent
tweets written by those you elected to follow.
Refreshing is not as instantaneous as in many other
chat systems. If someone writes a tweet, it may
take one or a few minutes before you actually see
the tweet displayed in the appropriate tab.
For sending
a tweet, you have to position the cursor in the
input area near the bottom of the TweeTabs window,
and just type your tweet in there. As long as you
do not hit the Enter key, you may edit and
correct your tweet. When you hit Enter, the
tweet is submitted immediately.
If
somethings goes wrong for any reason (for example,
you do not have Internet connectivity, or Twitter
is slow to reply), some diagnostic displays in red
near the bottom of the TweeTabs window. In most
cases, unusual conditions clear up by themselves,
so you should not be overly alarmed by such
diagnostics.
To quit
TweeTabs, either use the File → Quit menu at
the top, or destroy the TweeTabs window like you do
for other windows (often by clicking over some ✗ at
the upper right).
That's all
you really need to know for using TweeTabs. The
remainder of this tutorial addresses more advanced
topics. So, if you are fully happy with the above,
you may stop reading now! ☺
The
Me… tab combines in fact the contents of two
other tabs, which are its inputs. The
Me… tab inputs are hidden when the program
starts, so you do not see them. They may be
revealed by using Tab → Select → Add
inputs from the top menu, while the Me…
tab tweets are currently displayed. You'll then get
a User tab and a Replies tab.
You might
observe that the new tab labels are written in red.
This is just a way to indicate that these tabs are
now selected and ready for further advanced
operations. As you probably do not mean such
operations right now, merely clear by using Tab
→ Select → Clear all from the top menu. The tab
labels return to their normal color.
Why these
input tabs? What is happening here? Under the rug,
the User tab is really the one which is
updated, once in a while, from the Twitter site.
The Replies is updated as well from the
Twitter site, yet not necessarily at the exact same
time the User tab is updated. In fact, each
of these two tabs has its own means and life.
The
Me… tab, on the other hand, is not directly
updated from the Twitter site. It is instantly
updated from both the User tab and the
Replies tab. That is, when any of these
input tabs change for any reason (when newer tweets
are received from the Twitter site, when older
tweets are deleted to respect the tab capacity, or
when you interactively delete or add tweets in
them), the Me… tab immediately and
dynamically reflects the changes. The
Me… tab is a union tab with two inputs,
which means that it reflects all the tweets from
either input.
Next to any
tab label, there is a number written in grey color.
This number is merely the tweet count within the
tab. You may sometimes notice that the number of
tweets in a union is smaller than the sum of the
number of tweets in all inputs. This happens when
one tweet appears in more than one input, because
that tweet is counted only once in the resulting
union.
Let's
practice a bit more, and create a tab merely
copying the tweets from another tab. To achieve
this, we will use the fact that when a union tab
has a single input, its contents are the same of
the contents of this input.
Make sure
that no tab is selected, that is, no tab label
shows in red. Also, make sure the Me… tab is
the current tab. Using the top menu, do Tab →
Compose → Union. This creates the wanted tab,
and you may readily check that it has exactly the
same tweets as Me… Moreover, whenever
Me… gets periodically updated, the new tab
gets updated as well.
If you feel
like toying, you might create a copy of the copy,
and a copy of the copy's copy, and repeat the
operation many times, so creating a chain of
copies, a lot of tabs, and eventually, some
updating overhead while creating tons of
widgets.
Because no
tab was selected, the composition used the current
tab for its sole input. This is a common behaviour
in TweeTabs, selecting only the current tab or
selecting no tab at all are equivalent. We already
used this property earlier in the tutorial when we
tried Tab → Select → Add inputs: this then
added to the (empty) selection the inputs of the
current tab.
Alternatively, you could have explicitly selected
the current tab prior to the composition, by using
either Tab → Toggle select or Tab →
Select → Toggle select (the former is merely a
convenience for the latter). Try it! You might
observe that after selection, the current tab label
turns red, but after the creation of the copying
tab, that label turns back to its normal color.
This is also common behaviour in TweeTabs: after an
operation, the selected arguments are automatically
deselected.
This is not
always true however. The Tab → Select → Add
inputs is one such exception, it adds to the
selection all inputs from all selected tabs,
without clearing the selected state of the argument
tabs afterwards. So, by repeating the operation a
few times, you'll obtain all input tabs, direct or
indirect, for the starting tab. If you decided to
play and create a long chain of copies, above, you
may experiment this a bit deeper.
By the way,
you might have noticed that the created tab are
named Union, Union2, Union3,
etc. Indeed, tabs all have distinct names. If you
attempt to rename a tab to a name which already
exists, a number is automatically added to your
suggestion, so to make the name unique.
Union is
only one of TweeTabs' compositions. Let's now try
creating an intersection tab, whose contents are to
be the only tweets simultaneously common to all
inputs. For compositing a new tab, you have to
select the inputs first. For example,
assuming that no tab is selected, make the
Me… tab current and do Tab → Toggle
select from the top menu. Then, make the
Friends tab current and do Tab → Toggle
select again.
Notice that
both tabs now have red labels, these will be the
arguments to the next operation. Command Tab →
Compose → Intersection from the top menu, and
voilà, you now have a new intersection tab, likely
containing no tweets at all. The tab arguments have
been deselected, and the freshly created tab is now
current.
You can
take the difference between a tab and many others.
This will yield all tweets in the first argument
tab, as long as they do not appear in any other
argument tab. This operation differs from those we
have already seen in a few aspects, worth noting
here.
All
argument tabs are not equal. The first input is
positive in that it brings new tweets to the
result, all the others input are negative in
that they substract tweets from the result. So,
while selecting tabs as arguments, the positive tab
has to be noted especially. The trick is that the
current tab is the positive input, while all other
selected are the negative inputs. In practice, it
means that you select all negative inputs first the
usual way, that is, making a negative tab the
current tab and toggling it selected. Once all
negative inputs have been designed, make the
positive tab the current, and only then create the
difference.
As an
illustrative example, presume you want to monitor
in a separate tab those tweets that will arrive in
the current tab from now. You want to see new
tweets only, without the tweets which are currently
displayed. That is, only newer tweets.
The trick
is to take the difference of the current tab with a
frozen copy of it. This means three steps: you copy
the current tab, you then freeze that second tab,
and finally, you create a third tab as being the
tweets of the current tab minus the tweets of the
second tab.
A frozen
tab is merely a tab which has been made temporarily
immune to its inputs. Any change within the
inputs will have no immediate effect on a frozen
tab, those effects are all delayed until the tab
gets unfrozen back, later. When a tab gets
unfrozen, it immediately catches up on all changes
in its inputs.
Let's try
it for the Friends tab. With nothing
selected, make the Friends tab current, then
do Tab → Compose → Union. This automatically
creates a copy and switches to it. The next step is
to do Tab → Configure → Toggle frozen. The
tab label changes to use a leaner font, indicating
a now frozen tab. By using Tab → Toggle
select, we mark this tab as a negative input.
Now, make the Friends tab current again,
then do Tab → Compose → Difference. You now
have an empty tab representing the wanted
difference. As soon as new tweets will arrive in
Friends, these, and these only, will appear
in the difference tab.
In
practice, you do not keep your eyes fixed on an
empty tab, this is not an interesting thing to do!
You go to other tabs, at your will. As long as you
see the new tab label, you may monitor the number
of tweets it contains. When this number gets
different from zero, you may get back to the
difference tab and read the new tweets in there.
Once you are done reading them, you may go to the
frozen tab and do Tab → Configure → Toggle
frozen twice. This catches up, resets the
difference to empty, and starts the monitoring over
again, but from now this time.
Here comes
a few more technical words on technical aspects on
differences, which you may choose to skip.
On average,
TweeTabs do not fear loops between tab connections.
You may build a sequence of inter-connected tabs in
such a way that a tab eventually has itself as
input. There is no danger of infinite propagation
of tweets between tabs, rather, the system quickly
stabilizes. However, this is not true in negative
input contexts, where through a negating tab
connection loops, tweets may get infinitely added,
then removed, from a single tab. So, as a measure
of precaution,TweeTabs harshly forbids that the
output of a difference tab reaches one of its
negative inputs, even if a deep analysis of a
particular setup might prove that, through double
negation, it would make sense.
The
function Tab → Select → Add inputs has been
discussed a few times before. However, for the sake
of clarity in the case of a difference composition,
the positive input has the tab label colored in
red, while the negative inputs have the tab label
colored in magenta. The different color is only for
users to observe, it has no consequence other than
visual, and all inputs, either positive or
negative, are equally added to the selection.
You receive
those tweets written by your friends — or
from your following in Twitter parlance.
Those tweets you write are received by your
followers. Try either Tab → Users →
Followers or Tab → Users → Following.
You'll get an alphabetical list of your followers
or friends.
Notice that
the strips in tab you get describe users, not
tweets, even if the format is vaguely similar. The
same as you may compose tabs of tweets into a new
tab of tweets, you may compose tabs of users into
new tabs of users. But you may not create, for
example, a union tab out a tab of tweets and a tab
of users at the same time, as tabs should contain
strips of only one kind.
If you have
many friends and followers, TweeTabs may require
hours for listing them fully, at least the
first time through. The reason is that Twitter does
not allow more than 100 requests each hour. While
fetching the information for your friends and
followers, TweeTabs makes a request for a single
user information every ten seconds or so, but slows
itself down even further as the limit approaches,
trying to leave enough room for the other usual
operations. You might open Tab → Users →
Following, and also Tab → Users →
Followers, even if you do not need them. This
should trigger TweeTabs into progressively
rebuilding its user cache while you do other
things. When the user information is missing, a
user tab only shows the user id next to a white
image, and because numbers precede letters,
incomplete user tabs tend to group at the beginning
of the tab.
Moreover,
even when all the information is available in the
local database caches, TweeTabs may require many
seconds, even minutes, for creating all the widgets
and formatting the text for long lists of users. So
if you have many contacts, be patient. You should
be anyway! ☺
By
composing the above tabs with the difference
operator, you may easily obtain a tab showing
people you follow and who do not follow you back.
And also, the people following you, and for whom
you did not reciprocate. Try both of these, it
would help you mastering how to build
differences.
Here are
few random tricks using TweeTabs, presented in no
particular order.
- The whole spirit behind TweeTabs is to
combine almost empty tabs, meant to contain
interesting tweets, with other tabs from other
computations, also holding interesting tweets.
You manage so to have a single main tab of
interest overall, which subsumes other choices or
computations you organized in other tabs. You
keep that main tab displayed, and go to its
sources only where there is a need to do some
finer grain analysis.
- There is no menu entry for selecting all
tabs, or all strips within a tab. For selecting
everything, first use Select → Clear All,
just in case you would have something selected
already, then use Select → Inverse.
- If you do not want TweeTabs to open tabs on
startup, leaving to you to do it explicitly, you
might use option -n. You might want that
TweeTabs never open tabs on startup. If this is
the case, there is a way so -n will not be needed anymore.
Merely create an empty
~/.tweetabs/tabsetup.py file. When that
file exists, the default tab setup is inhibited
and that file drives the initial tab layout
instead. In particular, when the file is empty,
nothing happens.
- Currently, Strips → Sort all removes
all strips and inserts them again, in the proper
order. I suspect it might be faster to do it this
way for tabs containing lots of strips. This has
the side-effect of fully refreshing a tab's
contents, even if it was already sorted. This
might be useful to know for restoring a garbled
screen. But why would one get a garbled screen
anyway?! ☺
The
TweeTabs Reference is meant to say everything
an advanced user needs to know, yet without
examples, you need to be imaginative. Please tell
me any practical and interesting example which come
to your mind, I might even include it in this
tutorial page.
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