(I didn’t have any worth-while screenshots to show, so enjoy this photo of Adobe co-worker Matt Kursmark.)

I’d like to introduce DestroyTwitter 2.1.1 as a subtle update that carries a handful of improvements. First and foremost, there is now an option in the ‘Retweet Format’ preference for ‘native’. Many have asked for and/or demanded it, so I’m glad I’m finally able to deliver. What differs with this method of retweeting is its appearance upon submitting—if you’ve already seen the tweet you’re retweeting in your home timeline, you’ll simply receive an alert indicating success. If the original tweet hasn’t made an appearance in your home timeline, your retweet will drop in like the other formats. The reason behind this is Twitter only shows one copy of each tweet in your home timeline, even if that second copy is from you. Confusing? That’s Twitter for you.

Along with native retweets comes two welcomed features in the image service arena. Imgur joins the family of available services, though only anonymous support at the moment. Individual accounts will be supported in a future update. Also, image services now include the tweet’s text as the title or accompanying message of the image. You can thank @imjameshall for that suggestion.

In the Profile panel, you can now see how many lists the specified user belongs to. You can also click ‘view mentions’ to see tweets that have mentioned that user. Regarding fixes, I closed a number of runtime errors, which is always nice. I also fixed the image viewer scaling dimensions. Apparently, at certain ratios, the scaling was off.

That’s about it for this update, except for one undocumented feature I will keep to myself. If you read my blog, however, you’ll know what it is right away. If you’re a DestroyTwitter native, you should’ve been prompted for the update by now. Otherwise, download it from the website.

Sure, I could have spent tonight working on useful features for DestroyTwitter, but no, I wrote a KonamiCode class. To use it, simply instantiate it with a stage and you’re good to go.

On a related note, I realized I’ve been neglecting GitHub for months, but now I’m back! I also plan to return to the experimentation game after reminiscing about my convex hull, delaunay triangulation, and voronoi studies at work today. When you develop apps all day, writing experiments can be a breath of fresh air, allowing a level of creativity you simply can’t get with apps.

After releasing DestroyTwitter 2.0 back in June, I’m thrilled to announce it has reached the one million tweet milestone this past Friday, just shy of seven weeks. Once I added Google Analytics to Dwarf, I decided to include it in DestroyTwitter as well, tracking tweets, installs, and updates. Unfortunately, I didn’t think of using it for DestroyTwitter 1.x, so there’s nothing to compare this milestone to. Nevertheless, we’re going full speed ahead, averaging 30,000 tweets and 450 unique installs each day.

Its success to this day has been solely from word-of-mouth—something I’ve always been proud of. Keep spreading the word and I’ll do my best to continue growing DestroyTwitter in the right direction.

Anyone can tell you the key to my heart is cookies—and giant cookies make me blackout. You could dip them by breaking each in half or take it to the extreme and pour the milk on the cookies. Luckily for us, the folks at Entresuelo1a designed a cup intended specifically for the biggins. Now there’s good news and bad news. The bad: their online store isn’t up yet. The good: you can email them at info@entresuelo1a.com if you’re interested—I know I am!

I’ve been sitting on this update for a few weeks now, but the recent move to San Francisco has kidnapped my spare-time. Now that I’m almost settled, I was able to take advantage of the weekend to prepare for this launch. The most anticipated feature in 2.1 is themes. This was a popular feature in 1.x that didn’t make it into the initial 2.0 release due to time constraints. Now it’s back, but greatly improved, using CSS instead of XML. Keep in mind, it’s not fully functional CSS—it’s AS3-supported, so you can only modify specific properties. Even so, the number of elements you can customize has been multiplied fourfold.

With the reintroduction of themes, I’ve decided to make a few other changes. First of all, the Theme Builder is no more. Since CSS is much more familiar to most and there are dozens more parameters, it doesn’t make sense to maintain it. Also, it allowed anyone and their grandma to upload a theme to the depot. This was great for usability, but unfortunately, it flooded the site with thousands of themes that went unused. At the moment, 2.1 is bundled with a handful of themes and there’s no directory on the site. I did set up a section on the support site to upload themes and I’ll showcase the standouts on the website.

Regarding the thousands of previously created themes from 1.x, you can still install them in 2.1, but you might need to tweak certain elements that didn’t exist in 1.x. In Preferences, click ‘Install theme…’ and select the .dtwt file. It’ll automatically convert it to a CSS file in the themes folder, where you can open it in your favorite text editor. From there, you can change the theme, save it, then click ‘Reload current theme’ to see the updated look. If you’re working on a certain section of the app and don’t want to go back to Preferences to click the reload link each time, you can use the hotkey Command+Option+Shift+R on Mac or Control+Option+Shift+R on PC.

If you’re all set and ready to go, either download 2.1 from the DestroyTwitter website or simply update from the app if you have it installed already.

This was shot at the Berkeley Kite Festival this past weekend. I was trying out my new 16-35mm 2.8L II, which is terrific for landscapes, but also hilarious for portraits. I didn’t have too much time to spend photoshopping the image, so I used a technique I discovered a couple years back. It involves lightening the lights and darkening the darks by using two Curves layers—one for each extreme. It’s best to push both a good amount, then use the paintbrush at 5% or 10% opacity to unmask the areas you want to reveal.

I accompanied Jen at Read Street Tattoo Parlour as she acquired her fourth tattoo. To go along with her PA ink of a Pennsylvania Dutch hex sign, she had Charlie Foos draw a fancy Black-Eyed Susan, the Maryland state flower. Hopefully, next time she goes for one, I’ll have a solid idea for my first—I just can’t commit to anything yet.

This interview is from a few weeks/months back and it has a pretty unusual format, including an online audience who can chime in. Jen asked “Why are you so awkward?!” but I blame the two second delay. It was a pretty fun time and a new experience to say the least—I wouldn’t mind doing more audio/video interviews.

Finally. That’s all I can say after almost a year of on and off development, numerous rewrites, and a lengthy break. I have too much to say about DestroyTwitter 2.0, so I’m going to run through some of a big improvements and leave the rest to be discovered.

Complete Window Resizing

For those updating from 1.x, you could resize the window vertically and use ‘Wider Workspace’ mode to view three canvases at once. No more! If you want to go fullscreen, go for it. If you’re weird and want to show Mentions and half of Home, feel free. And if you resize the window to within 40px of a canvas’s edge, it’ll snap to that canvas.

More Accessible Settings

Instead of placing every setting and its grandma under Preferences, I decided to relocate a few. Now, if you want to change the refresh rate of a canvas, you can do it straight from the canvas. These menus also provide you with the hotkeys that match the function, so you no longer need to reference the documentation.

Composing tweets is where the settings relocation really shines. Instead of closing the drawer and heading to preferences just to change your URL shortener or image service, you can do so straight from the drawer itself.

The search history is also a context menu now with a dedicated item for clearing the history or the current search.

Preferences Galore

Though many of the settings have been moved, a ton still reside in the Preferences canvas. There are now three different font sizes for the older folk, icon sizes (including none), and a few tweetflow options.

Improved Filtering

Filters in 2.0 were known as ‘Rules’ in 1.x. Now, they have their own drawer that can be accessed straight from the canvas without heading to Preferences. You can filter users, keywords, AND sources. This means if you’re like me and hate check-in services like Foursquare and Gowalla, add them to the sources filter and boom goes the dynamite.

Easter Eggs

2.0 includes a number of goodies that aren’t exactly obvious at first. I plan to add documentation sooner than later, so you can check them all out. Two worth mentioning for now are multi-touch navigation and scrolling through unread tweets. The first only for devices that support gestures, like Macbook Pros. You can three-finger swipe from canvas to canvas. If you’re tired of scrolling through trying to find the next unread tweet, simply hold alt when arrowing up or down. It’ll select and scroll to the next unread tweet in that direction if one exists.

A Few Missing Features from 1.x

Many of you will notice a number of features that exist in 1.x, but didn’t make it to 2.0 (yet). The biggest two that are sure to affect a good number of people are Themes and Groups. Because of Twitter’s approaching deadline for the OAuth cutoff, I didn’t have the time needed to implement these and fully test them. Even though Twitter extended the deadline, I wanted to stick to my launch date. Themes will definitely be in 2.1 and Lists (formally Groups) will be in 2.2 or even earlier.

Since these features are pretty important to some users, I decided to change 2.0′s application ID, so if you want to continue using 1.7, you can. Installing 2.0 won’t overwrite 1.7. The unfortunate part of this is 1.7 won’t prompt for an update, however, you can run them side-by-side until the OAuth cutoff in August if you need multiple accounts.

There are billions of other improvements and changes, so be sure to explore a bit. Also, take note of memory usage. After a few solid weeks of testing, we’ve seen usage as low as 25mb. Not once have I seen it reach 70mb—and that’s after 24 hours of usage.

PLEASE READ

Now, this morning I had a number of issues with the destroytwitter.com domain, so it might still be propagating throughout the world. Also, make sure your address isn’t using the https URL. If it doesn’t load for you, you can download 2.0 here.

Enjoy it and if you have any feedback, bugs, or questions, hit up the new support site: http://support.destroytwitter.com

I’m gathering a list of highlights and would love to get everyone’s input. Why do you use DestroyTwitter over other apps? What features do you use and appreciate the most? Its light weight? Its abundance of hotkeys? Its long list of preferences? You tell me.