View Preferences

(version 0.4.2.x)

Preferences change the way Spaz looks, feels and works.

Account Information

Enter your Twitter username and password. Spaz needs to know them so it can post and receive Twitter updates. It’s saved (securely) so you don’t have to re-enter it every time.

Interface

User CSS: Lets you override parts of the currently loaded CSS, to add to or enhance the way that theme performs. (see CSS Hacks for more information) There are two ways to attach User CSS:

• Load from file: Click this button to choose a CSS file on your local computer.

• Edit User CSS: Click this button to open a separate window in which ti enter User CSS.

Theme: Use the drop-down box to pick one of the pre-packaged themes. The theme is loaded immediately.

Opacity: Affects how “see-through” Spaz is. 100% is not at all see-through, 0% is completely see-through (i.e. Spaz disappears!)

Parse Markdown in messages: Markdown is a “lightweight markup scheme”, a way of putting things like bold text into a text message. Tick this box if you want to see such effects. Note that you won’t see them unless someone else has used Markdown in their tweets.

You can find out more about Markdown at the official Markdown site.

Minimize to Systray: When ticked, minimizes Spaz to the System Tray rather than the Task Bar (when you click the Minimize button). See this Wikipedia article about the Task Bar for info about System Trays and Task Bars.

These are Windows-specific terms, although MacOS and Linux have the same concepts. What should I call them?

Minimize when in background: When ticked and you switch to another application, causes Spaz to automatically minimize to the Task Bar or System Tray (depending on the Minimize to Systray setting).

Restore when in foreground: I have no idea what this does. Is it the obverse of Minimize when in background setting?

Show notifications: When ticked, new tweets are shown briefly in a bubble of their own outside of Spaz. They appear whether or not Spaz is minimized.

Scroll to top on refresh: Tick this if you’d like Spaz to automatically return to the top of the tweet list (the most recent ones) every time it check for new entries.

Sound

Play sounds: Tick if you want Spaz to play sounds, untick if you don’t. Spaz plays sounds when:

• it starts up
• it closes down
• new tweets are received
• you send a tweet
• you send a “twoosh” (a tweet of exactly 140 characters)

Upgrades

Check on startup: Tick if you want Spaz to check for a new version of itself every time it starts. This will check only for stable versions.

Check for test versions: Tick if you want Spaz to check for a new non-stable (experimental) version of itself every time it starts. Experimental versions are announced on the Spaz User Group along with a list of changes / fixes.

Check Now: Click this button to have Spaz check for a new version right now.

Networking

Refresh interval: Spaz checks for Twitter updates every so often; this preference controls how often it checks. The default is 3 minutes.

Get rate from Twitter: Click this button to have Spaz set the Refresh interval by asking Twitter how many requests per hour are allowed.

Auto-adjust refresh interval: Tick if you want Spaz to automatically get the rate per hour, and set the Refresh interval, every time it starts.

Enable HTTP auth handling: If you are using a proxy that requires HTTP BASIC authentication, you may need to enable this option to enter your proxy username and password.

Debugging

Enabled: Tick if you want to turn on trace mode in Spaz. Trace mode dumps information about internal processing to a file called “spaz-debug.log”. The file is created in your “documents directory”. On Windows, this is the My Documents directory. On Mac OS, it is /Users/userName/Documents.

Dump HTML: Click this button dump Spaz’s main HTML document to disk. Like the trace, this can be very useful for diagnosing problems. When you click, Spaz opens a file dialog so you can enter the name and location of the resulting file. Once it has a name, Spaz dumps the file and sends progress message boxes. It’s not done until the “close stream” message box appears.