Gravity gets a minor update, Adds translation and Twitlonger support

Update: This is only a pre-release which @janole needed to release to address some regional issues related to China users. The actual official update release will follow soon enough.

Gravity just got updated to build 6700 last night to add some of the most requested features.

Gravity 1.50 Build 6700 change log

1. Inline translation support added
Finally Gravity has become the first symbian twitter client to add the inline translation feature, which means you can read those Russian or Urdu tweets directly and don’t need to run to the PC now. Though as of now there is no change of appearance for a translated tweet (like some different color), it is expected to be seen in the next update.

Note that the translation in Gravity is using the well known Google translation API, supporting as many languages as Google translate does.

Interesting to see that @janole used a more button as it was suggested by me earlier, though there are a few who wanted a separate Translate button. In my opinion, a separate translate button is useless for 99% of the tweets for most of the users.

2. Inline Twitlonger auto expand support added
This was yet another feature which was being requested all these days. Gravity was just relying on opening the link in the browser, even if it encountered any twitlonger tweet. The newer version, however will auto expand those long tweets (takes 1-2 seconds) as shown in this picture..

It doesn’t support other rival services like the increasingly popular deck.ly, which makes this feature not that interesting as of now. I hope if there are no issues from TweetDeck, @janole might even consider adding the same in Gravity.

Also, there isn’t a way through which one can post a tweet longer than 140 characters via Gravity as the send button disappears once you cross the character limit. The reason behind the same might be individual thought and decision, guess @janole doesn’t like the idea of longer tweets, just like how I do too.

3. Twip4 proxy support added
While this feature is not relevant for many, it might be the life savior for those who make use of their restricted internet connections. Particularly useful in China where twitter is blocked by their government.

What’s still not here:

Meeting the demands of users never goes easy and even if Gravity outperformed this one many times, there are quite a few things which are being expected from a new build for a really long time but still missing. There might be various reasons behind the delay, but I thought I’d list a few of them here.

1. YouTube client not yet added
This expectation arose only due to @janole’s own words. He’d mentioned once that he is working on a YouTube viewing client and trying to implement it right inside gravity. A client that could preview YouTube videos within the timeline itself.

We can still view YouTube videos via Gravity’s browser or the normal browser and there is a picture preview of the same video in the timeline, the ability to play videos isn’t added yet. Twitter’s announcement of new guidelines for developers recently rings a bell, maybe.

As of my knowledge, the YouTube client is on its way, it’ll most probably be here in the upcoming official release.

2. Notifications yet to be improved; A reply button yet to be added; Tap to return to App button missing
These small ones were being expected since the times when @janole released the 6698 build. Though these are minor tweaks and wouldn’t have caused much change to the experience, providing an option would have been useful.

3. Images section needs to be checked
While the images section is quite sophisticated already, some of us feel restricted due to the limit of a fixed number of images. I’d suggested adding a ‘browse’ feature once, let’s sit back and wait till it happens. Say, something like that of Nokia’s Social Client does by opening ‘Gallery’ itself within the client with an instant 3 row Image preview and kinetic scrolling.

4. The Facebook section is desperate, needs an update badly
If my memories aren’t too bad, @janole was planning to implement a self-dashboard kinda area in the facebook section. Definitely, it must be worth, leading to a decent facebook experience. Moreover, there are still some major elements of facebook missing from Gravity like browsing of photos or commenting on photos while almost every new client out there seems to be having the same.

So, this was all I have found till now, will add more if I spot something new or you tell me if there’s something new. Here goes the download link for you all, in case you’re interested. It’s the latest version, yes!

Download

Follow me on twitter via @nkumar_ for quicker updates.