What’s New?
- An absolutely massive redesign
- Great new pop-out media viewer
- Automatically load more Tweets when you reach the bottom (infinite scrolling)
- A native Instagram photo viewer
- Circular avatars
- Direct Messaging with conversation views
- user account, hashtag, and link highlights
- The icons in the timeline switcher change to alert you to new mentions and messages
- Click the home button to return to the top of your timeline
- Stars are out, hearts are in
- Higher resolution images throughout
- and much more!
Installation
The best way to try Birdie 2.0 for elementary OS is to add our Daily PPA. To do so, just enter these commands in your terminal:
- sudo apt-add-repository ppa:birdie-team/daily
- sudo apt-get update
- sudo apt-get install birdie
You can also download .deb packages from our Downloads page, but you won’t receive automatic updates if you install via this method.
Please keep in mind that this is unstable software. You WILL run into bugs and crashes, so if stability is crucially important for you, you may wish to wait until the final release.
Important Note for Freya Users
Birdie 2.0 uses several features available in the latest version of Granite, which isn’t available in elementary OS Freya by default. You will need to manually install the latest unstable version, which we have linked on our Downloads page.
Known Issues
There is a rather nasty bug that results in a crash about 25% of the time when you launch the app after you have already logged in to Twitter. Once the app opens Birdie is pretty stable, but if you do encounter a crash when trying to open it, just try it again. I hope to get this fixed very soon.
No cursor when writing a new Tweet. You will be able to share new Tweets just fine, but right now the cursor isn’t visible when typing in the text box. It’s on my list.
Not all messages are visible in the Direct Messaging history view. Newer messages will show up just fine, but some older direct messages don’t show up because they haven’t been retrieved from Twitter and saved in the database.
How to Help
While using Birdie, if you encounter any problems or have any suggestions for improvement, please report an issue on GitHub.
If you would like to support the continued development of Birdie or gain access to our Slack team (where you can see ALL development and discussions as they happen in real time), please consider supporting me on Patreon. For just a couple bucks a month, you can make a huge impact on the project and make it so I can afford to keep going, plus you get can get some nice perks out of it as well.
Okay, that’s all I want to say for now. I hope you enjoy using Birdie! If you try it, please be sure to let us know what you think on Twitter.