From This Day

Here comes the new, fresh qTwitter! As Twitter is slowly switching from basic authorization scheme towards OAuth, the client applications should follow the change. The support for OAuth was the main milestone for qTwitter 0.8.0, and here it goes. It’s basing on the QOAuth library, which uses QCA and stuff and introduces, uh, dependencies, but in the same time it ensures far higher security for Twitter accounts.

What does it mean for the user? You’re not going to be asked to give your Twitter password inside qTwitter. Moreover, qTwitter won’t ever know your password and store it anywhere. Instead it will be given a unique token, which combined with it’s own token issued by Twitter (and with some other info like the current time and a totally random text string) will be used to request your account’s data from Twitter. How will qTwitter get the key? It will open a browser with a special Twitter login page, where you would be able to authorize it to access your data. Cutey, isn’t it?

• automatic (or not – it’s fully confgurable) checking for available updates,
• storing statuses lists together with their read/unread states between sessions,
• improved look and feel, meant by revisiting themes, colors, sizes, layouts, fonts, ...

The public timeline support was dropped, because it “was decided” that it’s not the most wanted feature on Earth. And since it was making some additional mess inside the code, I was just purely happy to remove it. Thanks :)

As for new contributions, this time Thúlio Costa came up with support for migre.me URL shortening service, and Faster provided Italian translation. Thanks a lot guys!

qTwitter 0.8.0 is available from qt-apps.org (no shit, Sherlock…), but hah! It’s not so trivial this time. As I mentioned, OAuth support, although done by me, is an external package, and both Debian/Ubuntu and Fedora will ask for libqoauth before allowing you to install qtwitter. Then the QOAuth library is available from… qt-apps.org. Thank you qt-apps.org, you rock!

I tried to do my best at packaging and it seems to be working, but don’t hesitate to contact me in case of any troubles.

And finally, note that the OAuth authorization is now a preferred scheme for qTwitter, although for those of you that insist on using basic authorization (or not pulling in more dependencies than Qt itself, or whatever) a possibility of compiling qTwitter without OAuth support is given. To do this, get the sources (e.g. from the above-mentioned Qt applications portal or GitHub), and comment out a define in qtwitter.pri:

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DEFINES += OAUTH #comment out to disable OAuth

That’s it. Enjoy qTwitter!