Twitli:
Twitter client for Android phones

Version 1.9 Help pages

Basics

Open a Tweet! window by tapping one of the statuses. Other options given there are DM and @Reply. Tap and hold for a second to get another menu where you can select one's messages, profile, web site, etc. Similarly, tap on a dot on the map to Tweet, DM or @Reply.
Settings are now under "More...". You confirm changes by simply hitting the back button.

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Photo settings

Twitli can upload your pictures to your Flickr, MobyPicture Google Picasa account, then tweet the url. You check "upload pictures to flickr" or "upload pictures to Google Photo". In the menu, there is an option "take picture". Selecting that menu item makes Twitli show the camera. You take a picture, then Twitli takes the picture and uploads it. The resulting url is appended to the comment you typed with the picture and tweeted to Twitter. In Flickr, photo's are put in your drop box, in Google Photo, Twitli creates its own album in which it puts your photos.

The first time you upload a picture, Flickr or Google will ask you to authorize Twitli for uploading photos.

You can take a picture by pressing the camera button, but also by pressing the trackball or the space bar.

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Authorize Twitli for your Flickr account

In order to upload your pics to Flickr, Flickr needs to know that you allow Twitli to do so. When uploading your first photo, Twitli sends a request to Flickr and points you to the Flickr website. Flickr asks you to log in (unless you are already logged in) and asks you to press "OK, I'll allow it".
When you reset your phone in a way that Twitli has lost its data, or when you have uninstalled and reinstalled Twitli, Twitli needs to get a new authentication key. This means that after a hard reset of your phone or after reinstallation of Twitli, you may be directed to Flickr authorization again. Probably, Flickr will remember that it has already authorized Twitli so it will not show the "OK, I'll allow it" button, but rather it will tell you that authorization is ok. You then go back to Twitli and continue uploading your photo, which Twitli will then tweet. You just log in to your account, then press the blue button marked "OK, I'll allow it". Flickr will remember your decision. Twitli will be authorized to upload to your account by a code obtained from Flickr. Whenever you want to cancel this authorization, you go to your Flickr account, select the "extending Flickr" and remove Twitli from the list.

If you withdraw authorization for Twitli with Flickr but you don't uncheck the "upload pictures" checkbox in Twitli, Twitli will ask for authorization again the next time you try to upload a photo. Uncheck the box if you don't want to upload. If you don't upload the pictures, you cannot take pictures using Twitli, you have to use the camera in your phone in the normal way.

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Google Photo authentication

 In Google, authentication works slightly differently. You need to supply your Google user name - that is, including the gmail.com part - to Twitli, which then logs into your account. Twitli obtains an authentication key from Google, which it can use to upload subsequent photos.

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Translation

Twitli uses Google translation to translate tweets in your language - or any language that Google translation supports. Switch on "Use translation" in the UI settings menu to use translation. By default, English is set as the language tweets will be translated to. In the UI settings menu you can change the language to any language that Google supports. When translating, Twitli will first detect the language of a tweet, then translate it if it is not your language - or not the language that you have selected tweets should be translated to. Please realize that if you get a lot of tweets in foreign languages, loading tweets will take some time because of the translation process. In that case, it's best to set the number of tweets that are loaded to a low value. You can fine tune the translation process in "advanced language settings". Also, in the user menu - which you get by clicking a friend name - you can set the language for that particular friend. This will save time because Twitli doesn't have to detect the language.

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Advanced language settings

If you are bilingual or even multilingual, you probably want to see tweets in languages that you know untranslated. In "advanced language settings" you can select additional languages that Twitli will not translate. If your native language is Chinese, but you also speak Japanese and Spanish, the main language will be set to Chinese, while Japanese and Spanish will be selected in "select additional languages". All tweets will be translated to Chinese, except tweets in Japanese and Spanish - and tweets in Chinese of course. Presumably, the remaining tweets that need to be translated will be few.

Google detects the language of a tweet, and it provides a confidentiality factor. The more certain Google is about the language, the higher the confidence factor. By default, Twitli will assume that a tweet is in a particular language if the confidence factor is 0.1 or higher. This means that languages of most tweets is diagnosed correctly. Twitli will also attempt to set the default language for a user. Knowing in what language a user tweets makes the translation process faster because it eliminates the language detection phase. Twitli will set language for a user if the confidence factor for a particular tweet is 0.5 or higher.
You can experiment with these settings, although we recommend to keep the default settings. A confidence factor ranges from 0 to 1.0.

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Account settings

In "Set Twitter credentials" you specify your userid and password for Twitter. Twitli needs these in order to log into your Twitter account and download timelines and upload your tweets.

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Auto refresh

Twitli by default automatically refreshes the timelines every three minutes. Uncheck the "auto refresh" checkbox in "settings" to disable this, or change the refresh interval.

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Timeline

Under "Timeline" you select which messages you want to see: your friends timeline, your direct messages or @replies sent to you.

If you want to see the tweets from a particular person, you click that persons name on the screen and select "view thispersons messages". If a new DM has come in, Twitli will notify you by displaying "DM!" in the title bar.

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Follow

This menu option gives you a list of all tweeps that are mentioned in the various timelines. To follow one of these, just select one and Twitli sends a "Follow" message to Twitter. You can follow one person each time you select "follow". To stop following, select "stop following" in the user menu.

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Hash tags

In Settings, you can specify one or tags. Twitli keeps appending these tags to your tweets until you specify other tags or no tags. In an @reply, the tag will not be used.

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User menu

When you click on a tweet, a menu is shown. The first line is the users name, if provided by the user. The next options are "send reply to user" and "send direct message". With these you send an @reply or direct message to this user. Don't include their screen name, Twitli automatically prepends the screen name to the @reply.
"Stop following" will cause you to stop following this person.

If translation is switched on, you will see an additional option in the user menu: "language settings". Here you can set the language for that user. The current language for this user is displayed below the user name. This language was set by you or detected by Google. By selecting "let google detect language" you reset the language for this user, making Twitli set the language again by using Google language detection. Alternatively, you can switch off translation for this user.

You can long click the tweet for more user options.

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Settings

You can set the number of tweets on your page, ranging from 3 to 200 - which is the maximum number Twitter allows. Reloading 200 tweets does take time, so don't set this to more than 30 unless you specifically want to see all those tweets. You can select if you want to see pics in portrait view. Not showing pics makes room for more tweets on your screen.

There is a setting for "log level". You should normally not have to use it. If you experience trouble using Twitli, you can change the log level to "debug" and send the log file to the developer. By default, the log level is set to "errors" which means only errors that occur are logged.

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Exiting Twitli

Twitli does not have an "Exit" button. You should exit Twitli by using the back button of your phone.

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