Thu, 28 Aug 2008

Updates to Twitch

I'm happy to announce that siwawong is now helping out with development on Twitch. He's been working really hard and as well as cleaning up my code he's added a bunch of great new features. Some of the new features include:

• Support for Hashtags
• TwitPic integration
• View and send Direct Messages
• Windows systray icon
• Thai language support
• Supports twitters in_reply_to
• Refresh button and status messages

The list goes on. As soon as we get everything tested I'll make a new version available for download.

Wed, 27 Aug 2008

URL Shortener Publicly Available

After saying that one of the main advantages to using my own URL Shortener was that it isn't open to the public I've gone ahead and opened it up; I just can't help myself. I still don't think many people will use it over some of the other URL Shorteners out there so using up the available short URL's still shouldn't be a problem. This probably still falls under the heading of being more use to me than anyone else but if you do want to use my service you're most welcome to. It's fairly simple right now, just enter the URL that you want to shorten and hit the button. I am counting clicks for each link and I'll make that data available for everyone once I figure out a sensible way to do it. To use the service just follow the link at the top of the right hand column.

Custom URL Shortener

As I mentioned in the update to my last post I've created my own Custom URL Shortener for use with the "Tweet It!" function. I've also modified TwitterPhoto so that it now also uses my Custom URL Shortener. There's two advantages for me doing it this way. The first is that because it isn't open to the public all the short URL's aren't going to get used up. The second is that I have a way to track my links. The third reason is just because it was fun to do! I'll probably modify Twitch to use this service in the future too. I'm keeping a count of how many clicks each link gets and may look at making this info publicly available. My thinking here is to allow people to see how many people click on their TwitterPhoto links.

Tue, 26 Aug 2008

New Tweet It! Links

You may (or may not) have noticed that posts here at richfish.org now all have a "Tweet It!" link. The idea started because I wanted a way to have links to my blog posts sent to my twitter account. Because I'm not using a CMS or popular blog software it came down to having to write something to do it myself. When I stopped and thought about it I realized that I wouldn't want every blog post sent to twitter, so a fully automated system wasn't the right way to go. Also, by doing it this way, visitors now also have the opportunity to send links via their own twitter accounts, which is nice. Clicking on the "Tweet It!" link will create a TinyURL of the permalink to the story and have that and the story title ready to be sent to twitter as an update. Just enter your twitter username and password to send (usernames and password are not stored in any way).

Update: I've created my own URL Shortener so links sent to twitter will use a custom richfish.org shortened URL instead of TinyURL. URL's will be at least as short as TinyURL's and in some cases shorter.

New friendfeed Beta

So friendfeed has a new beta website that you can try out by going to http://beta.friendfeed.com. While the interface is much improved and they seem to have some nice new features (I'm not a friendfeed user so I'm not going to attempt to drill down on new features) the biggest problem that I still have with the site is the way that they display information in your feed. I'm sure there is a very clever algorithmic explanation but I still can't figure out why sometimes you see "Posted a message on Twitter" as multiple stand alone entries and other times you see "Posted 5 messages on Twitter" and you see the first two and then have to click a link to have it expand and show the other three. Also just throwing everything onto a white page doesn't seem like the most helpful way that they could be displaying all of that data. As it develops I'm starting to come around and see the usefulness and potential of the service but the number one priority should be presenting all of that information in a more intuitive way IMO.

Tue, 19 Aug 2008

Website Updates

It may not be immediately obvious, except for the addition of the right hand column on the front page, but I've been making some changes to the back-end here at richfish.org. I nearly have everything working exactly the way that I want it and am excited about posting again for the first time in a long while. I'm also spending a little more time on Twitter after some time away. Next on the list is to build more robustness into TwitterPhoto. I've noticed a number of people signing up for TwitterPhoto and never posting any photos. I'm assuming that this is because their first attempt is failing and they're not trying a second time, not a good thing from a developer perspective.

Adobe Air Marketplace

I received an email last week from the product manager of the Adobe Air Marketplace inviting me to upload Twitch. As I've said before, Twitch came about mostly as a learning exercise for me to play around with Adobe Air. There are a lot of good Twitter clients available that are being actively developed and have much to offer. Twitch is simple and suits the way that I use Twitter; if anybody else finds that it also suit them then that's great but it's not the main focus. Anyways, it's always nice to receive an email saying "it's a really a nice application. Thanks for putting in all the hard work in creating this application." So I went ahead and uploaded it.

Mon, 18 Aug 2008

Twitter API gets an update

Twitter have updated their API so that the /statuses/update method now takes an optional parameter: in_reply_to_status_id. This means that the Twitter system now accurately keeps track when a status update is in reply to another specific update. Previously Twitter assumed that you were replying to the last update from that person; it also removes the necessity of using the @ sign (although they are asking for developers to continue this convention). So my question when I read this news is " does this mean we're going to see an interface update from Twitter that displays threaded conversations?". I'm assuming that the answer is no and Twitter will be leaving it to developers to implement, therefore making it optional for users that want to use it.

Like google, part of Twitters philosophy for success is it's ease of use and simplicity. Also like google, I don't expect any major changes to the current simple UI. What I personally would love to see is Twitter adopting another google idea. Google have an alternate search interface at searchmash.com where they experiment with lots of ajax and alternate display methodologies. I'd love to see Twitter adopt the same idea and have and alternate development site where they use ajax to update the page, display conversations as threads, and whatever else people can come up with. Come on Twitter, what do you say?

Sat, 16 Aug 2008

Movies arrive in the Australian iTunes Store

While I wasn't looking Apple have slipped movies in to the Australian iTunes store (around the 13th August). After a quick look it appears that the majority of movies are available for purchase with a very small subset also available for rent. Movie purchases are priced between $12-$25 while rentals all seem to be $5.99. Considering the rental offerings don't look like the newest of new releases I could walk to my local video store and rent a movie that is a) Cheaper b) Better quality c) Doesn't have any of the problems associated with streaming or downloading.

While purchasing movies still isn't as cheap as I would like to see for digital only copies there is one possible upside to purchasing them through iTunes. If Apple treats movie downloads in a similar fashion to music purchases and you are able to re-download any movies that you have purchased, if you lose them for some reason, this could be an interesting way to maintain a movie library that never disappears or degrades. Along with making Apple TV somewhat usable, this is about the only upside that I can see with the present movie offerings.

Fri, 15 Aug 2008

Porting Twitch to Identi.ca

About a month ago I received an email from one of the developers working on the open source Twitter alternative Identi.ca asking if I would like to get Twitch working on their platform. They made it extremely easy by producing a Twitter API (the idea being that you can just change your URL calls from twitter.com/ to identi.cs/api/). After thinking about it initially and just thinking about it again I've decided not to port Twitch over for the following reasons:

• Twitch was written as a learning exercise to see what I could do with Adobe AIR
• It uses polling to update your timeline and I don't think another polling client is doing anyone any favors right now
• Although I have an account I don't use Identi.ca

This doesn't mean that I don't think what they are doing over at Identi.ca isn't good because I do. I recently read that multiple instances of laconica have been made to work together which is a huge step in the right direction. However I think there is still so much work to be done; and clients that adhere to the current state of micro blogging may cause more harm than good. I'd really like to see some of the ideas that Dave Winer suggests here come to fruition. Payloads and threaded discussions are vital to the future of micro blogging.

Moving to new Hosting

I'm in the process on moving the site to new hosting at mediatemple. Twitterphoto should continue to work through the DNS change but if you experience any difficulties drop me an email. Once the move is complete I'm planning a number of changes and upgrades to the site. As well as making the front page more useful and updating a little more often I'm planning on getting back to doing some more app development too. I've chosen to leave the old posts behind and start fresh; there isn't anything important being lost and a fresh start is appealing.