Trowel
======

Friday 22 January 2010 06:14

I've been using Trowel for a month now and still
like it very much, even if I do say so myself.
Trowel is a Perl script I wrote - based on Richard
Stelling's original implementation - that uses the
Growl framework on OS X to smoothly pop up the
tweets that appear in a Twitter timeline. There's
probably a ton of applications that offer similar
functionality, but this offers the full power of
the Practical Extracting and Reporting Language -
a.k.a. Perl - to quickly adapt it to keep the
timeline usable and keep Trowel from clogging up
the entire screen with tweets.

My context is that I use it on an iBook with a
1024x786 screen and I follow about 70 people almost
24/7, which gives me with an update interval of two
minutes a couple of tweets once in a while. Since
clicking on links in quickly vanishing Growls
wasn't feasable I opted to just open the links in
the tweets automatically. This can also be filtered
because I'm not interested in every single program
on Arte, or every foursquare check-in, but I don't
mind collecting a bunch of tabs in my browser with
funny youtubes. Trowel also notifies when you lose
or gain followers, and it keeps a cache of avatars
it displays with alpha-transparancy in the Growls,
just to keep it as smooth as Growl intended.

by Roland van Ipenburg
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ipenburg/blog/posts/work/2010/01/22/trowel/