Awesome Tweetie bookmarklet!
Tweetie for Mac is, in my opinion, the best Twitter client for Mac users. It’s a very beautiful application, just as you’d expect. But, there’s one disadvantage: after using Tweetie for a while, you hate the slow Twitter website.
But when do you use the Twitter website, when you own Tweetie? Well, a few weeks ago I wouldn’t have an answer to that question, but everything changed since Spotify launched in The Netherlands. The problem is that whenever you’d like to share a nice song on Twitter, you are sent to the Twitter website.
And that’s exactly what we don’t want. Tweeting a tweet via the Twitter site takes a long time and until that’s done, you have to leave the tab opened in your browser. Or, when you’d like to change some things in the tweet, it’s much prettier to do that in Tweetie than on the Twitter site.
So, what we want is an easy way to open those tweets in Tweetie. The best solution would be that the sender (Spotify in this case) opens Tweetie directly, but that’s not something we can decide. It would be possible to do some tricks with a browser extension in Safari, Chrome or Firefox, but I don’t like that solution: you have to create browser specific extensions and therefore you need to learn browser specific codes and all the things. What remains is simple: a JavaScript bookmarklet.
Atebits (the company behind Tweetie) offers a simple bookmarklet by themselves, but all it does is tweeting the location (URL) of the current page. That’s a nice bookmarklet and I use is often, so I wanted to add the functionality to my bookmarklet too.
After coding, trying and debugging for some time, I created a bookmarklet that does the following:
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If you’re on the Twitter site on a page containing a tweet field, the entered tweet is sent to Tweetie and the tab closes automatically. This works only with tweets or mentions and not with DM’s (that’s a limitation of the URL Scheme of Tweetie).
Note: if you have JavaScript disabled in your browser or on the Twitter site, the bookmarklet won’t work as expected!
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If you’re somewhere else, the title and the URL of the page are sent to Tweetie in this form:
“Title” (URL)
The tab doesn’t close.
I can’t imagine that you wouldn’t like to use this bookmarklet. The only thing you have to do to install the bookmarklet, is dragging this link to your bookmark bar: Post with Tweetie.
When that’s done, you could test the bookmarklet by pressing it while you’re on this page. And if you’d like to test the bookmarklet on the Twitter site, here’s a tweet that opens on the Twitter site.
Tip: do you like the bookmarklet? Just use it to tell all your followers about it! Press the bookmarklet while you’re on this page and send the tweet to tell it to anybody.
Please leave a comment below if you have any suggestions or in case you experience problems with the bookmarklet. I tested the bookmarklet with the latest versions of Safari, Chrome and Firefox and I didn’t found major bugs.