Trowl 0.8, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love API 1.1

Overdone jokes aside, I realized that I use Trowl too much, and I invested too much time in the app, to just toss it aside when Twitter decided to finally turn off version 1 of its API. That said, it’s not a trivial process.

Technical Details

If you’re interested, Trowl was originally built on requesting XML responses from Twitter. This was primarily because, at the time, .NET was best suited for parsing XML documents more than anything else. With the switch to API 1.1, Twitter completely dropped the ability to request XML responses, in favor of JSON. Luckily, .NET has become more fluent with JSON recently – but it still meant going back through all my calls to Twitter and replacing the XML-based response/parse logic with JSON-based response/parse logic.

The Status of 0.8

Okay, so, I’m making this version 0.8 because I’m essentially changing the entire foundation that Trowl is based on. There aren’t any new features here, but it’s a big enough infrastructure change that I felt justified in bumping up the version to 0.8.

I’ve converted almost everything over to API 1.1 except the following:

  • Controlling Trowl through DMs (which I don’t think anyone uses anyway)
  • Spam reporting
  • Additional caching in light of API 1.1’s stricter rate limiting

Everything else should work, but I’m releasing a development version first so people can try it out and let me know what bugs they find.

Trowl 0.8 Download

UPDATE 6/17/2013+ Another quick update that fixes some issues with retrieving friends (darn those stricter rate limits!). Authorizing a new account should be fixed now too.

UPDATE 6/17/2013 All functions should be switched over to API 1.1 now, but please send me any bugs or issues you find. Thanks!

Thank you for sticking by Trowl during the API shutdown!

Tagged , ,

One thought on “Trowl 0.8, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love API 1.1

  1. Craig Andera says:

    I’m unable to authorize, even if I delete my C:\Users\…\Trowl directory and start over.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *