Also, there’s a problem with checking the ‘twitpic’ box in the images tab. We’re looking into it right now, but it may take a while. Please uncheck the ‘twitpic’ box to get the fountain up and running again!

Our apologies for any inconvenience!

The new animation style uses a 3D effect to display 1 twitter message at a time.

To select the animation, choose ’swing’ from the message animation settings.

The new animation is still in Beta, like the Japanese font support. You can try it out at www.twitterfountain.com/kanji

We’ve finally come up with a solution. When displaying a Twitterfountain, you can open the settings menu and click ‘load kanji’. This will load the Japanese characters (Kanji and Kana).

Loading Japanese characters (also usable to display Chinese) comes with a small price: an additional download of 1MB. By comparison: the regular font is just 16KB.

When embedding a fountain, you can choose to load Japanese characters by default. Just tick ‘load kanji’ before getting the embed code.

Please preview the new font-enabled Twitterfountain and tell us if you find any irregularities! When all goes well, we will replace the old TwitterFountain.

www.twitterfountain.com/kanji

Our resident hackers have come up with a way to quickly build a Twitterfountain without having to visit the Twitterfountain-site and going through all the settings! Simply type in the url http://twitterfountain.com/custom/yourkeyword and replace yourkeyword with the hashtag or keyword of your choice.

Try these to see how they work:

http://twitterfountain.com/custom/obama

http://twitterfountain.com/custom/ladygaga

http://twitterfountain.com/custom/chatroulette

Adding a custom image search

When you don’t want the image keyword to be the same as the twitter search keyword, you can add a slash and then add your image keyword, for example:

http://twitterfountain.com/custom/luigi/supermario

About using hashags in the URL

Currently you can’t use a # character in the URL bar, please replace this character with %23. You can also leave the hash out entirely if your keyword is unique enough.

Example: http://twitterfountain.com/custom/%23supermario

Which new features? Well: there is a whole bunch of new animation styles, both for tweets and photo’s, you can use photo’s from Flickr or Picasa; we now support Twitpic and YFrog images as well, and there are alot more ways that you can customize the appearance of the Twitterfountain.

So, check your old blogs and pages starting February 1st and replace your TF to enjoy the best new version of Twitterfountain so far!

Mind you, we are still working on updates of the official Wordpress-plugin and the OSX widget. We’ll let you know when they have been updated.

We are thrilled to finally bring you a lot of the improvements you requested, and we promise you a lot more will follow suit in 2010. But let’s first take a look at what we’ll deliver in a few days:

• New styling:
  • You can adjust the colors
  • set a title bar
  • hide the title bar
  • seat a custom logo
  • set a custom background
• New sources:
  • You can choose between flickr and Picasa as image source
  • You can select to display Twitpic and YFrog images as well
• Animations:
  • We offer three animation types for the background images: Slideshow, Moving Slides and Stack
  • we offer five animation types for the tweets: Fountain, Distance, Subtle Fade, Widget and Twirl
  • And of course, all these animation types can be modified using the settings
• Better Full screen display
• Better Embedding
• Faster, smoother graphics and lighter processor load, because of the Improved animation engine

After releasing version 2.0, we will continue with other improvements. Some of those were requested, some will be added to offer complete new ways of use. We will let you know as soon as we’re ready.

Enjoy!

Over the last year we have seen the use of Twitterfountain rise, with installments on thousands of websites all over the world. And all that time, you have told us what you would like Twitterfountain to do for you. We have tried to incorporate as much of your requests as possible, and we will include even more in the near future.

Some of the items that we will fix in the upcoming release are:

• more styling options to customize the appearance of Twitterfountain
• An option to set a static background image
• displaying Flickr or Picasa images
• displaying images from tweets (using twitpic and or yFrog)
• smoother animation, less processor load
• more animation types

… and a lot more. Stay tuned for some more details later this week, and get ready to sign up for a private beta account for Twitterfountain3.0 as well!

In the mean time, we want to once again extend our gratitude to you, the users, for helping us make Twitterfountain even better. Please keep using the Uservoice tab to give us your feedback!

To summarize the updates we’ve done so far:

• a cleaner look and feel of the whole application
• a less intrusive title bar
• a cleaner ’settings’ panel, with tabs for messages, images and embedding options.
• option for animation style of twitter messages
• option for showing a background box behind the twitter message

As you can see from this screenshot, you can achieve a very clean looking app. In this case, the background box of the twitter message is disabled, images are disabled, and the animation just fades the messages in and out.

The next screenshot shows the new settings panel, subdivided into tabs. You can also see the option for choosing different message animations. Currently you can choose between the ‘old’ vertical animation, and a more subtle fading animation.

Please review the demo here!

When the new version is finished all “old” twitterfountains running on websites, blogs and events will automatically be replaced by the new one. Backwards compatibility should be ensured.

Comments and suggestions are more than welcome!

For now we’ve fixed this by adjusting the embed code: when you want to use a Twitterfountain that searches for tweets that start with ‘#’, we recommend you copy and paste a new embed code in your blog, by using the ‘embed code‘ button in any twitterfountain.

You can also adjust the code by hand, in that case you need to replace all the ‘#‘ characters with ‘%23‘. For example:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.twitterfountain.nl/embed/twitterfountain.js?fv_event=%23twitterfountain, fv_flickr=twitterfountain,fv_kleur=FF6600, fv_animationtype=1, fv_showtint=true, width=400, height=300″></script>