In v0.47 you can set the time interval betw tweets in a sequence.#

There's a new preference. Click on the Gear, then the Timing panel. #

The default time interval is 1 second. #

Change it to 5 seconds and give it a try.#

I don't think so. I think it'll stimulate more thinking about ways Twitter could be upgraded, and made more useful, interesting, and have more possibilities for the future.#

Tweetstorms are just one way people have come up with to circumvent the 140-character limit.#

There is the twit-longer approach.#

There is also the write-a-blog-post-and-link-to-it approach. #

There is also the cram-it-all-in-somehow approach and hope someone figures out what you mean, and of course they never do, resulting in tweet-flames coming back, and after a while you give up trying to communicate ideas that don't easily fit in 140 characters. And: That's not a good solution!#

Twitter has become a primary means of communication for lots of people, including people who have ideas that are worth hearing, and people who could benefit from hearing ideas that they are not now hearing.#

There's a logjam of stagnation. #

Couldn't a compromise be worked out?#

Let me write a longer tweet and only display the first 140 characters? Then put a little wedge next to it, and allow the reader to expand to read the rest? #

I really don't see the harm in it, and as a software designer, I look for ways to give everyone what they want and in this case I think it's easy to do. And you know what I would be very surprised if the engineering team at Twitter hasn't already provided for the day that the 140-character limit is no more. Tweets are already sprawling megaplexes of metadata. The only part of a tweet that's still small is the most important part. Why? That's one of the mysteries of the universe. #

We live in a time of same-sex marriage and legal marijuana. Maybe the 140-character limit is next?#

I think Little Pork Chop, which has been publicly available for only 3 days, has already stimulated lots of discourse and thinking about possibilities. I don't think too many Twitter users were doing that last week. Now we're getting creative. It's a long time since we looked at Twitter and saw possibilities. That's, imho, seriously fucked up. #

Perhaps it's a surprise that the Twitter API is still capable of supporting innovation. It must be that way for a reason. People who say Twitter was always meant to be one way, and not to evolve, imho, overlook that it had an API from the beginning. Twitter never actually said they don't want innovation from developers, though their actions kind of did. But people can change their minds. In that way Little Pork Chop is a question for the people running Twitter. May we try interesting ideas out? Will your product change to accommodate them, as it used to?#

BTW, there's one simple feature they could add (well I don't really know if it's simple, but it seems it would be). Allow an app, through the API, to say "this tweet shouldn't display in the timeline." I would modify LPC to set that bit on messages 2 through N in a sequence. Then you'd click on the first message and see all of it. Tweetstorms wouldn't be any more or less annoying than other 140-character-limited messages. #

Summary: Here's a screen shot of 0.46 on my iPhone 5s.#

It works: Evidence.#

The rest is TL;DR. #

Last night I had a friend over, and was reminded that a lot of people use phones as their primary way to access the web. So it was embarrassing to see what Little Pork Chop looked like on an iPhone. #

I had to fix it. So I stayed up late and got it working.#

I had been trying out a lot of approaches, and finally nailed it with a combination of CSS and JavaScript. I have an object called the "tellTalePart" that contains nothing, but is visible on phones, and not visible on other systems. So at startup I check to see if it's visible. If so, I know I'm running on a phone.#

Then I created an alternate set of objects laid out so they work well on a vertically-oriented phone. I set it up so the algorithms use these objects instead of the others. And I hide the objects that are meant for desktop and tablets.#

On the desktop systems, I hide the phone objects.#

It all seems to work!#