It’s been a drag since Twitter IM went down. I had a very brief “play” time the other night that gave birth to Twittipy. It’s a Twitter notifier written in python with pynotify and pycurl.

Running Twittipy

1. Create a configuration file in your home directory (~/.twittipy)
2. Set your Twitter username/email and password in the configuration file.
   Example:
   [general]
username = johnsmith
password = unhackable
3. Make Twittipy executable
   $ chmod u+x twittipy.py
4. Fire it up!
   $ ./twittipy.py &

Twittipy requires Python 2.5, pycurl and pynotify. If it complains of missing modules, you probably didn’t meet the requirements.

Roadmap

I did some googling and found other stuff to try that could improve Twittipy.

• Port for other platforms (Windows with pywin32 and KDE via wxPython)
• Icon at the notification area or system tray (via wxPython)
• Encrypt or obfuscate password in config file and/or if password is not found in the config file, prompt and store in memory.
• Make use of the other methods of the Twitter API.

Download it here. There are two more options in the config file, update_interval and last_update. The former defaults to 4 minutes and the latter to the current time.

I’m quite satisfied with it. The notifications of pynotify are less obtrusive than an IM message. There’s one noticeable quirk where a tweet repeats. We’ll fix that for the next release.

Comments are welcome and please check out tweetyPy as well (not mine but also an academic project).

Pidgin kept crashing when I tried tunneling through a remote machine. After minutes of googling around, I found Finch, a command-line version of Pidgin! It used to be called Gaim-text. Really cool!