My first post on this blog and I thought it was best if I wrote about the best app (code wise) I have made.
I joined Twitter in 2014 but didn't start using it properly till 2018 (I created some Twitter bots which got me interested in Twitter). Sometime around August 2018, I wanted to share some tweet on Instagram and searched for an app that could convert a tweet to an image. I found nothing and ended up sharing it by taking a screenshot, but the idea of the app stuck with me.
After some googling, I came across Cameron Adams' experiment Screenshot a Tweet (related blog post). With this tool in mind, I started developing a similar app for Android.
I used Twitter's oEmbed API to generate a better-looking tweet, which I could convert to an image. The API also had some additional features like a dark theme, including parent thread, hiding media which I included in the app. In v1.2, as an additional feature, I added a Square Image feature, which generated a square image (for Instagram).
3 weeks after the initial release, I released v1.4 (current release) which had some additional requested features and fixed some bugs. I won't go into the complete details of every bug, but write a summarised description/fix for the developers reading this blog.
- v1.1 (Released a day after 1.0) added a Settings UI (with options to remember options such as dark theme, hide media, square image, etc) and added translations to 15 Languages (I might make a post related to generating translations using code someday).
- v1.2 (Released a day after 1.1) added the Square Image feature and fixed the bug where one couldn't save multiple copies of the same tweet if they used separate options. I was initially using just the Tweet ID as the filename but added additional text for each option used.
- v1.3 (Released a week after 1.2) fixed the big issue of the gallery not showing the images downloaded using the app. I learnt that one need's to programmatically refresh the gallery after adding/deleting any image. (SO post that helped me)
- v1.4 (Released 10 days after 1.3) Added the option to share directly to Instagram Stories and replaced Switched with Checkboxes (people on Reddit convinced me that its better UX)
You should give my app a try if you are an Android user.
Top comments (2)
This is great and really well thought out! I love the fact that I can share a tweet to the app directly from Twitter and that I can set all those option. Above that, keeping the transparent rounded corners in the generated png is also a nice touch ;-) Thank you for this app!
Thank you