First there was Jon Hicks’ Helvetireader, then Ad Taylor’s Helvetical, now there’s JosFrichter’s Helvetwitter. A complete revamp of Twitter.com, using userscripts, removing virtually every element from the sidebar to the top navigation. All you get is the Twitter stream, and text field. Gorgeous, although I would love to see avatars in there.
Before installing, Jose notes the following:
- The userscript reloads page every 5 minutes. If it reloads at the moment you are writting a tweet, it will get lost, unfortunately. I may write some javascript test for the automatic reload to prevent it.
- During reload, you may see the original ugly Twitter css for a second.
- Twitter’s css files are far from being clean and easy to understand. Thus my css based on them are far from perfect too. Although I have not encountered problems during 1 month of using it, there may be some.
- I have not tested anything but the very basic Twitter functionality.
To install, ensure you have Greasemonkey for Firefox installed or GreaseKit for any webkit browser such as Safari. Then click here to install the main userscript.
Great stuff. Unfortunately, you linked helvetireader instead of helvetwitter (“here to install”)
Great find, anyway. Thanks.
Nice! Can we take a poll on when Twitter will start offering themes?
I like the design, but I don’t think it’s appropriate for Twitter. Twitter is strongly based on customization of the page. If we load this script, conversation on Twitter becomes sort of anonymous. Also, there are no avatar.
I suugest to keep on workin on it, preserving all aspect of customization.
I quite like Helvetireader, which has much more sense, imo (and I use it). Helvetireader has an additional script to load singles favicons, preserving customizations of the single sources. I’d love Helvetimail but doesn’t work fine on my mac.
Looks good all trendy stuff seems to be gone :)
I agree with Ilaria, with this skin Twitter is too impersonal, anonymous. I don’t understand well who is writing.
Minimalism is good but you have to adapt the concept in different ways, seeing the context you are working on.
amended thanks