Heybuddy, some thoughts

Feb 3, 2011 (about 1 year ago)

I really like Heybuddy. I like the software and I like the community surrounding it. I think Heybuddy itself is probably the best identi.ca/status.net client available for the Linux desktop, hence why it is now included in CrunchBang.

Previous to Heybuddy, I was using Pino. Pino was great, but the developer decided to rewrite it from scratch and it looks like it might be heading the way of Gwibber, which also used to be great.

Anyhow, while I was using it, something I liked about Pino was how I could toggle its visibility by clicking on its system tray icon. I wanted this same behaviour in Heybuddy, so the other night I started playing around with the Heybuddy code.

A few minutes later I had created a trivial little patch, which I sent to Jezra, the Heybuddy developer. I did not think Jezra would apply the patch, thinking it to be a personal preference, but he did, which I am pleased about.

There are some other modifications I would like to see happen with Heybuddy. For a start, having used it on my desktop machine at home, which I never turn off, I have found that it tends to cause quite severe CPU usage spikes after a week or so of running. I have not investigated why this happening, yet, but if I had to guess, I think it would probably have something to do with Heybuddy keeping a week’s worth of dents in its display. Restarting Heybuddy fixes the issue, but it is not ideal. I think it might be an idea if Heybuddy were to free-up some resources by only keeping the last X (user definable) amount dents in memory. I might look at how this can be achieved myself, but my Python coding abilities are limited, so if any Python hackers can provide assistance, I would really appreciate it.

Tagged with: heybuddy, identica, python

8 responses to “Heybuddy, some thoughts”

  • dom dom on,
    Feb 3, 2011 (about 1 year ago)

    speaking about it… as far as i know is twitter (for example) in germany way more popular than identi.ca. and heybuddy does not support twitter, does it?

    it’s just a lil bit weired because that makes heybuddy a very specific program which is included in the standard configuration of #!.

  • corenominal corenominal on,
    Feb 3, 2011 (about 1 year ago)

    @dom, as far as I know, Twitter is far more popular in many countries, but popular!=better. Also, I understand that it might be considered a little bit weird to include such a service specific program, but I can live with that. :)

  • jezra jezra on,
    Feb 3, 2011 (about 1 year ago)

    Thanks for the patch. Personally, I don’t use heybuddy as a tray app so I’ve never experienced the need to toggle, but I can certainly see the desire to have the usability enhancement.

    Heybuddy only keeps 3*initial_dents and if it were to keep more, there would probably be a spike in memory usage and not in CPU. I still think the issue has to do with the XML parsing but I can’t nail it down for certain.

    Code on!

  • corenominal corenominal on,
    Feb 3, 2011 (about 1 year ago)

    @jezra, sorry, I did not realise it was 3*initial_dents, my mistake. Anyhow, I have set-up a spare machine to run some more tests, it may take a while, but hopefully I will be able to report back with something useful. Thanks again for Heybuddy, it rocks! :)

    P.S. I went to buy you a coffee earlier, but found that you had commented out your coffee fund donation form. Any plans to bring it back? Also, have you considered Flattr for your project pages?

  • Syanide Syanide on,
    Feb 6, 2011 (about 1 year ago)

    I find the choice of removing Twitter weird and maybe not much thought out choice, because it is de facto microblogging standard. And I know, Identi.ca has this, Twitter has that, you can go in circles all day long. Oh well, defaults are there to be changed.

  • corenominal corenominal on,
    Feb 6, 2011 (about 1 year ago)

    And I know, Identi.ca has this, Twitter has that, you can go in circles all day long.

    Yes you can. Also, it should be noted that I did not remove Twitter. Native Twitter support in Pino has been broken since Twitter moved to OAuth. So, I was left with the choice of including a semi-working client, or moving to a dedicated service specific client. I chose the latter. Also, IMHO, Heybuddy rocks! :)

  • johnraff johnraff on,
    Feb 16, 2011 (about 1 year ago)

    No mention of heybuddy support for Open ID login. That’s what I missed in Pino too.

  • corenominal corenominal on,
    Feb 16, 2011 (about 1 year ago)

    @johnraff, good point. Maybe you could enter it as a bug/feature request on the Heybuddy Launchpad page?

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