TweetFire lets you easily tweet the image you're currently working on, without ever leaving Fireworks. The command posts a flattened copy of your image to TwitPic and attaches its URL to your tweet.

After opening the TweetFire dialog for the first time, you'll need to enter your Twitter username and password. These credentials are saved across sessions in the Fireworks preferences file.

Then tab to the Tweet field and start typing. The number of remaining characters counts down from 110, rather than the typical 140, to leave some room for TwitPic URLs, which are about 25 characters long. Even if you go beyond 110 characters, though, whatever you enter will be sent as the tweet. The text isn't clipped.

When you're ready, just click the Tweet button. Another dialog will open with a progress bar, and will remain open until your image is exported and posted to TwitPic. Once your tweet is live, a dialog will display the URL to your image. This URL is also automatically copied to the clipboard, so you can easily paste it into a browser to view the page.

Exporting part of the image

By default, your entire image will be uploaded to TwitPic. If you'd prefer to tweet only a portion of your image, select the elements you want to include and then choose Selection With Background in the Export combobox. This will crop the image to the bounds of the selection and export just that area.

If you don't want to include the background pixels, then choose Selection Without Background. The selected elements will be copied to a new document and exported on a plain white background, which can be useful if you want to tweet just a logo or icon that's part of a larger design.

You can also use a slice to define the portion of the image to export. Just select the slice and choose either of the Selection options in the Export menu. The selected elements, or the entire image if nothing but the slice is selected, will be cropped to the bounds of the slice.

Notes

The document's current export settings are used to create the image that is sent to TwitPic, which supports only GIF, JPG and PNG files. If your current document is set to export as a TIFF, say, you'll need to change the export format before tweeting it.

Also note that the TweetFire extension uses the old Twitter API that sends your password in the clear. If you're not comfortable with this (or with saving the password locally in the Fireworks preferences file), TweetFire's not for you. It may also stop working suddenly if TwitPic starts enforcing OAuth for all tweets.

TweetFire uses the FWXHR library to post images and tweets to TwitPic. It also uses the Command Dialog library to create the Flex dialog using just JavaScript.

Release history

0.1.4

Fixed bug that prevented extension from running on OS X.

0.1.3

Thanks to some rapid-response QA from David Hogue, fixed a bug that prevented TweetFire from running if the Fireworks Console wasn't open.

0.1.2

Added option to export only part of the image. Included updated fwlib.dialog library to show the command name in the dialog title. Fixed bug where it could interfere with other commands.

0.1.1

Initial release.