If you’ve ever wondered why auto-refresh in Hahlo4 doesn’t seem to work for you even though its turned there is a good chance you’ve also got the “Inline Replies” and/or “Inline Messages” options turned on too. Currently, when you enable one (or both) of these options auto-refresh will be automatically disabled when viewing your friends timeline (it should still work for mentions, user timeline etc.)

This is a carry over form Hahlo 3, where it was put in place for two reasons. Firstly having both inline options turned on in addition to auto-refresh has the potential to burn through api calls very quickly (eg. 3 requests every refresh, at 1 minute intervals would have used 90 api calls per hour… at the time the limit was just 70 per hour). With the api limit now at 150 this isn’t as big an issue as it was previously, but still something to be aware of. Secondly I had great difficulty getting the auto-refresh to behave correctly when the inline options were turned off, I was frequently getting the wrong responses (ie. more or less tweets that I was expecting).

That second issue may have been rectified with the rebuild for Hahlo 4, but I am yet to test it. I will try and sort it out prior to launch so that those of you with “Inline replies” or “Inline messages” turned on can still make use of the auto-refresh feature.