First stab at web page thumbnails in Witty

I experimented a bit more with adding site preview thumbnails to the open-source Twitter client, Witty.

With a little bit more experimentation I got a first pass at the thumbnails showing for any web pages mentioned in a tweet.

There are several big problems with this though. First, it doesn’t appear like my eventing is right so the page doesn’t fully load before the thumbnail is created. As a consequence whole or parts of pages are left empty. That’s not necessarily a terrible thing, but it’s not right, either.

For instance, in Chris Pirillo’s tweet, the thumbnail should look more like:

rather than what’s shown in the previous Witty screen capture.

The thumbnail rendering can also add a noticeable time delay to tweet loadings. There’s probably no easy way around this. I’ve been wondering if I can trim down the posts by looking for RSS items instead and working off of their content and maybe pulling out a representative image or something. Hmmm.

Of course, there can be problems with JavaScript errors and the like too. So I’ll have to think through if this all of this is worthwhile. Maybe I’ll just have to live with it a few days to see if the benefits of the thumbnails outweigh the drawbacks.