FAQ

• I like the count on the toolbar, but not the popups. Is it possible to prevent popups of the tweets completely?

Yes – go to Settings and untick all of the boxes in the first row under ‘Notifications’.

• Is it possible to access multiple Twitter accounts?

Yes! Now it’s possible to access multiple Twitter accounts through http://crxclone.appspot.com service. You only have to click this link: http://crxclone.appspot.com/extension/encaiiljifbdbjlphpgpiimidegddhic/clone and this will install a Silver Bird clone in your browser. Now if you look at the extensions page, there’ll be two Silver Bird extensions installed. They’ll work independently and that’ll allow you to log then into different accounts.

• Why is Google Chrome telling me that Silver Bird will have access to my private data and browsing history?

Because of some of the new features in Silver Bird (e.g. Showing tweets on page when they arrive, and the ability to use a different URL to connect to Twitter’s API) Google Chrome may warn you that the requested permissions for the extension were changed, and that it’ll have access to your private data and browsing history. This happens because the permission settings in extension’s manifest are defined as:

"permissions": [
  "tabs", 
  "http://*/*", 
  "https://*/*"
],

There’s nothing to worry about in this fact. Silver Bird is committed to never grab any personal information from you. It doesn’t even have access to your Twitter’s password. All these permissions are only required because it’s the only way to implement all these cool features.
Because we need to make XHR requests to a configurable host and because we need to inject the frame showing new tweets to whatever page you may be visiting at the moment, there’s no other option besides setting the permissions as they are set today.

If you’re still worried you’re invited to review the source code yourself, and remember that lots of people may do the same. It’s all open and available here .
Also remember that the set of permissions for Silver Bird is the same as a bunch of other extensions (e.g. Google Translate, AdThwart, StumbleUpon, etc), and that all Firefox extensions have even more permissions, including permission to run arbitrary code on your machine.

• It looks like Silver Bird has stopped updating new tweets. What’s happening?

That’s probably because you’re hitting Twitter’s API rate limit. It’s simple to verify if that’s the case, just click the “Options” button for Silver Bird in Chrome’s extensions page and verify the “Remaining Twitter API Hits” field in the Options page. If it’s 0 then that’s the problem.
Usually consuming the rate limit too fast is an issue when you use multiple Twitter clients at the same time, as they are all consuming from the same limit. To avoid this problem you can tweak the “Refresh Interval” values in the options page.
I plan in adding some kind of notification whenever the rate limit starts wearing out too fast for the next versions.

• Whenever I click Silver Bird icon I get an error message telling me “Ouch… Something bad happened to Chrome Bird while calling Twitter’s API.”. What’s the problem?

This message is shown because there was an error while trying to get OAuth’s request token. In all cases that I’ve investigated this was caused by an invalid OAuth signature due to incorrect date and time settings in the user’s machine. So, please check if your time settings are correct, in special, if your timezone and daylight saving time settings are correct.

• Is there a way to open links leaving the popup open?

Yep! Just middle click or Ctrl-click the link. This way the link will be opened in a background tab.

• Is it possible to send tweets pressing “Enter” key?

You can sending tweets using Ctrl-Enter. I thought that only hitting Enter would make it too easy to post tweets accidentally.

• Where can I report bugs or request new features?

Please open issues in http://github.com/cezarsa/silver_bird/issues

• What’s the license of Silver Bird?

It’s available through the very simple and permissive MIT License