By Manuel Cortez
April 13, 2023
Reading time 3 minutes
Today we have releasing a new version of TWBlue, the software that from now on can only be used to manage Mastodon accounts. As of last week, Twitter has definitively cut off access to its API for most third-party clients, such as TWBlue. From MCV Software we can only regret this situation, and act accordingly, removing the source code from our repositories that was used to communicate with the Twitter API. The development of TWBlue, although without Twitter support, still continues and we are working on improving our support for Mastodon, while exploring other protocols and different sessions to add to TWBlue. Our goal for TWBlue is to become a multi-session, multi-service client so that it will be possible to manage a wide variety of accounts on websites with TWBlue. We will shortly update the website and all project information to reflect these changes in our goals, but in the meantime, here it is, once again, another new version of TWBlue.
News
During the development of the current TWBlue version, Twitter has cut out access from their API, meaning TWBlue will no longer be able to communicate with Twitter. This is the end of the support of TWBlue for Twitter sessions. No new sessions will be available for this social network, and we will focus in adding more features to our Mastodon support and writing support for more websites and networks. Thank you everyone who have been using TWBlue to manage your Twitter accounts since 2013.
- TWBlue should be able to display variables within templates (for example, now it is possible to send a template inside a post’s text). Before, it was removing $variables so it was difficult to show how to edit templates from the client. (#515)
- Mastodon:
- it is possible to add descriptions for all media available on Mastodon (audio, photos, video and Gifs). (#516)
- TWBlue can now perform OCR in attached images.
- It is possible to add aliases to mastodon users. Also, the “manage user aliases” setting, located on the application menu within the menu bar can be used to add, edit or remove aliases.
- Implemented “Hide emojis on usernames” in both GUI and invisible interface.
- Added an experimental feature to recover from connection errors. When making a post, if the post cannot be published due to any kind of error, TWBlue will bring up the dialog where the post was composed, so you can give the post a second chance or save the post’s text. This feature should work for threads, posts with attachments, polls and replies. (#527,) #526, #377 #137 and #108.)
- When playing media items, TWBlue will prefer remote URL streams and fall back to instance cached stream URL’S.
- Fixed an error on mentions buffer that was making TWBlue unable to load posts if there were mentions from a blocked or deleted account.
- Fixed an error when loading timelines during startup where TWBlue was unable to change the buffer title properly.
Download
You can get the latest available version of TWBlue from our download site. You can also perform an automatic update, in case you are already using the application. Due to changes on Twitter, we will officially stop providing support on our old Twitter account, but you can always find us through our Mastodon account, as @[email protected] and you can also report bugs through our issue tracker on GitHub.