ReTweeter 0.9.1 Released

Photo by Andrea Mercado

Thanks to Karen Huffman (@slakm) who raised some issues she was having with an installation of ReTweeter, I’ve tracked down the bug and uploaded and released 0.9.1.

Turns out that in late December of 2008, the Twitter API servers started sending a 417 Status Code response to many clients, including ReTweeter. (See Alex Payne’s announcement on the Twitter API Google Group and this message from Tom Morris which identified the necessary fix for CURL based clients).

In addition to squashing that bug, this update also better handles error responses from the Twitter API in general, which is to say it actually identifies to the user what status code was returned to enable better troubleshooting.

Remember to copy your settings from your old version before overwriting with the new.

If a DM falls in a forest . . .

On Twitter, when you try to send a direct message to someone using the web interface, by entering “d nobody My message” (where “nobody” is a username), and the person you are trying to reach doesn’t follow you, you get a nice error message:

The same is true when you use SMS or IM to interact with Twitter.

However, if you use a Twitter client, what happens?

On Twitterific, nothing. The message appears to be sent, nothing shows up your timeline, no error occurs.

Is this a limitation of the API, or of the application’s handling of it?

Update:

@Twhirl tells me (via Twitter) that:

twhirl should display an error message informing you about it.

Maybe time to change? I sent the twitterific developers a note letting them know of the bug.

What does your twitter client do? Tell me in the comments, please.