Notify On All Unread Tweets (Not Just Mentions/Replies)

[John Anthony Kazos Jr.]

Gwibber as a client is useless to me until it can show Twitter messages as unread no matter if they are directed at me or not. I do not appreciate a piece of software trying to tell me what I should be interested in. Until Gwibber supports this functionality, I am stuck using clunky, buggy, and slow AIR applications.

The ability to see all tweets as unread and to be able to with a single click mark them as read, and to have unread tweets remain unread forever until I explicitly mark them as read, is critical to a working Twitter client.

[Vadim Rutkovsky (roignac)]

I guess, this is duplicate of bug #633817 and bug #353860 - please, specify which ideas would you like to add the existing problems.

[John Anthony Kazos Jr. (jakj)]

Not a duplicate of those, no. When I was first trying (and failing) to get Gwibber working for me with Twitter, I found several closed bug reports against Gwibber that stated the functionality would not be added because (to paraphrase, because googling for 10 minutes and I can't find them again, for some reason), 'Will not be implemented because it would lead to too much information noise for the user.'

I don't know why I can't find those bug reports now, but anyway, that is the point of this one. When I first tried Gwibber and saw "Only display notifications for mentions", I went "Aha" and immediately unchecked it. And Gwibber then proceeded to do absolutely nothing for an entire day, as I watched the tweets roll in. So I looked on the Internet, and found those bug reports.

I am using the gwibber-daily repository, by the way. I haven't tried it again in the past few weeks, so if some bug somewhere has been fixed, I can try it again to see if this issue is resolved.

[Vadim Rutkovsky (roignac)]

As far as I understood, you would like to add a new option for "Show notifications for:" - "Unread messages"? I guess, that is possible.
Should the message be marked as read after notification has been displayed?

[John Anthony Kazos Jr. (jakj)]

Yes, let me give you two examples from other clients to illustrate this.

First, Choqok: The main stream window pretty much looks just like Gwibber's, except without the tabs on the left and not quite as pretty. Just the messages in a list. Unread messages are shown normally, read messages are shown dimmed/grey. If you close/open the window or the entire program, unread/read are still shown the same. If you click anywhere in a message, it marks it as read, meaning it dims. There is also a menu option "Mark all as read".

Second, Mixero: This program is unbelievably awesome, but also excessively buggy. Mixero goes one step further, and has a little button that basically says Show Only Unread Messages, so there's no scrolling involved. It also separates by contact and group and has an Active List and lots of nice things.

But just in summary, to get Gwibber into the "enough to be usable" classification, the only thing that needs to be implemented is a single flag per message saying if it is read or unread, and any sort of visual distinction (greyed background, an icon, changing the colour of the bar above the message et c.) to indicate this. And this flag would have to persist between invocations of the program, with -no- automatic "all messages read" when you close the window (though that would be fine as a config option for some users).

The suggestion in #633817 is a step in the right direction, but not at all what I want, because that idea is directed more towards the person who has hundreds of followings and is using Twitter as more of a ticker-tape service. I use Twitter exactly as if it were a read-only email system: I have a handful of followings, which are projects, companies, and blogs that use Twitter not as a conversation system but as an announcement system (like RSS in a way, I suppose), and I want to see these messages just as I see messages in my email inbox.

If you would like some screenshots, I could go make some to illustrate.

[Vadim Rutkovsky (roignac)]

That's pretty clear - I did like Choqok's read feature