Ok, so when Ryan Paul (from Ars Technica) started working on gwibber as a twitter client I was mildly interested. It wasn’t until identi.ca was launched that I moved wholesale and needed a good client. (Twhirl and Spaz are good too but the Linux Adobe AIR alpha is holding them back).
gwibber was kind of Ryan’s playground application where he could mess around with things like webkit and GTK stuff. However, people wanted an identi.ca client, and started using it. Ryan wanted to do the packaging himself to learn it (and hopefully write it up for open.ended) so we specifically avoided packaging it. Well, it became more and more popular, and it was time to make packages, it was already in bzr and on launchpad, so it would be heresy to not leverage the awesome power of Personal Package Archives.
This evening I registered the gwibber-team and set up a PPA. Instructions are here. Note that it depends on the webkit PPA, so you need both sets of sources. gwibber uses webkit to make the cool layout you see in the screenshot, complete with reflections and rounded corners!
Before anyone asks, no, I won’t be putting these up for Intrepid proper, gwibber is still fast moving and needs work. Branches are popping up all over the place and people are Doing Great Things(tm), but it’s just too fast moving to maintain in the distro, which is why we have PPAs! With webkit coming in a future version of GNOME it should start to settle down. You’ll find my packaging branch at the previous URL, if you want to jump in and help out then let me know!
You can follow me on identi.ca using gwibber, I am @jorge, and you can follow Ryan too, @segphault. Come join the other bunches of Ubuntu users on identi.ca!
Installation notes for our openSUSE friends are here. If someone wants to throw these into Debian post-freeze then please let me know, and of course feel free to steal my packages!
Awesome! Been looking forward to the webkit version. It looks really nice.