kosertech

I’m working on completely redoing how the avatars are loaded and stored, in the current versions all of the avatars are stored in memory which should perform better but in reality it doesn’t after some testing. I’m going to change how the avatars are loaded and some initial tests show a pretty decent speed increase as well as reducing the memory footprint by the size of all the avatars in memory. For a full 200 item timeline this will be a decrease in ram usage by at least 300k or so. Thats pretty significant on a smartphone.

The upside of this is that it also has appeared to seriously increase performance not having to double handle all the images to keep them in memory. I’m working on finishing this off in a dev test version then I’ll get a link to the dev versions on the google group for people to try out.

I’m also going to revert back to a more generic power management call for sound alerts if the device is asleep because I’ve seen some reports in my tweetscan of people having trouble with that.

@spmwinkel wrote a great review and user guide for ceTwit 2.0 that was released yesterday.  Head on over to his site and checkout the extensive walk through of the configuration and features of the touch screen version.

[Review: ceTwit 2.0 - free Twitter client for Windows Mobile ]

The final release of ceTwit 2.0 has been posted at the downloads page.  There have been many enhancements to 2.0 over 1.4, the biggest change is storing the timeline in a database and merging DM and replies into the timeline.  You can filter down to view just DM or just Replies as well.  For a complete feature rundown checkout the info page

I want to thank all the dedicated beta testers for all the bug reports and valuable feedback and suggestions during the process of the rewrite to 2.0.

[download]

The final release candidates are out for ceTwit if you find bugs please report them via the google group or drop me a note on the contact form on the site here. Barring any major issues I’ll mark these as 2.0 and start adding new features.

There was a slight change in the timeline navigation for touchscreen, you can now use right and left on the D-pad to page up and page down and holding down the right direction will bring up the context menu as it always has. You can of course use the stylus to bring up the context menu but I’m not a big fan of the stylus so try to make everything usable form the menu/D-pad as well. As always the center button will zoom in for a full view.

[ceTwit 2.0 final release candidate for smartphone]

[ceTwit 2.0 final release candidate for touchscreen]

I’d like to get a little more organized around interacting with the ceTwit user group so I created a Google group for us to all use to discuss features, bugs and other ceTwit related items. This should allow for a little more interactive discussion that everyone interested can follow along with. Twitter is great for a suggestion of a feature but it will be nice to allow others to discuss or add thoughts along with items and expand on things a little more than 140 characters will allow.

It should also make for a nice place for users to report bugs and allow me or other users to respond with information about potential problems or to help test if its a problem across all versions or just an isolated incident. I have hopes that it will turn into a nice place for everyone to collaborate about issues/feature requests.

Oh yeah, the group is located here [ceTwit Google group]

I have had a few requests for a Today screen plug-in for ceTwit that would show the count of unread tweets / DM and Replies.  I have been putting this off because its not easily accomplished in managed code and I’ve got plenty that I still want to add into ceTwit before undertaking something like that.

I know of a good program that already has twitter posting from the Today screen called TwitToday and I approached the author (@dalelane) to see if he would be interested in doing some integration.  Thankfully the author of TwitToday has expressed interest in working together.  The real benefit here is both our programs can benefit through the integration without much work.  The end result should be the great functionality of a quick post from the Today screen as well as the ability for you to see on the Today screen a quick view of your unread items waiting for you in ceTwit.

Look for this new functionality in the next month or so when Dale and I have time to get the details worked out.  If you haven’t tried out TwitToday give it a go it’s very nice for a quick twitter status update from the today screen.

If your a software developer I encourage you to seek out solutions like this that benefit everyone without duplication of efforts.  Preventing duplication of effort lets everyone focus more on their core area of expertise to result in better quality software.

I get asked once in awhile why I spend all this time making a twitter client and give it away.  For the most part I started out just writing it for myself so it would work like I wanted.  There was a certain way I had envisioned a windows mobile twitter client working and I wanted to get back into mobile programming anyway so it seemed like a good opportunity to kill two birds with one stone if you will.

I got to learn allot about the .net web libraries that I hadn’t worked with before as well as learn quite a bit about phone power management and other oddities of working with a phone vs the desktop.

The thing that really keeps me going though is the userbase of the ceTwit programs.  I get quite a bit of feedback and have made some great contacts on twitter with people that use ceTwit.  All of the users give great feedback and have become a real neat group of people contributing ideas and thoughts about how things work or could work differently.

The refresh of ceTwit to the 2.0 versions has given me the opportunity to take all the feedback I have gotten over the past few months and really rewrite things from scratch and make it a much better piece of software.  The ability to have it always refreshing on my phone has really changed how I can use twitter.  The merged timeline and alerts have been fun to play with also.

Hopefully I’ll be releasing the 2.0 finals in the next week or so for both platforms.  I’ve been getting great feedback from the beta testers and making speedy progress on getting things ready to release.  There are features left I still want to add but I think it’s a good time to cut a build at this point and get the stable 2.0 releases into everyones hands.  I have to leave something to put in version 3 right?

Release candidate 5 is now available on the downloads page. Updates include the ability to create your own custom color theme. Also the timeline is now merged and you will see DM’s Replies and friends messages all mixed on the main timeline view. You can filter to only replies and DM if you like.

There are also now alerts via vibrate and sound when new tweets arrive.

[download]

The last day or so twitter has had some following/follower contacts issues where people lost contacts. They are working to restore them but for those that wish you can make a backup of your contacts for reference periodically just to have a record of it in the case of disaster.

This method will work for those who are following less than 100 people. Make a call to the twitter API like this.

http://twitter.com/statuses/friends.xml

If your following more than 100 people you will need to add the page parameter which will return the next 100 you are following, append the parameter page=2 for instance
http://twitter.com/statuses/friends.xml?page=2
for the next 100, keep adding 1 to the page until you capture all your followers then merge the data in excel or some other tool.

What will be returned will be an xml file of the people you are following. You can save this file then import it into excel or some other tool for archival. In excel choose file-> open and select the xml file you saved from above. Select read only workbook and it will give you a nice spreadsheet format of the data that you can save to a regular excel file. This should work in open office but I don’t have it installed to check.

To archive the people following you use the same method but the following url
http://twitter.com/statuses/followers.xml
You can apply the same logic as the above page=2 to capture followers beyond the first 100 such as

http://twitter.com/statuses/followers.xml?page=2

Happy twittering

So, As my loyal readers (all 3 of you) may have noticed over the last few weeks I’ve been waffling on the whole iPhone 3g thing. I had to travel last week for an entire week and spent large amounts of time away from a PC. My friend has an iPhone that was updated to the 2.0 software so I got to spend allot of time on it while traveling.  I also was reminded just how indispensable my windows mobile 6.1 HTC kaiser is.

I realized a couple things while essentially going head to head with my friend both doing similar work.  I was able to stay connected to IM using shape services IM+ the entire time we traveled.  This was a real benefit.  We were in all day meetings and being able to answer emails via exchange push email as well as monitor IM for quick questions from people back at work was great.  I was taking text from IM messages with some stats a colleague sent me and copying and pasting them into an excel spreadsheet I had open the whole week on my phone.

Of course I had ceTwit running the entire time also pulling my timeline every 3 minutes so I could stay up to date on that.

All in all I was a multitasking fool during that week on my phone.  I got allot of use out of the today screen checking if I had gotten any new IM’s and checking in on emails and some rss feeds I had scrolling above my next few calendar entries.

My time spent on the iPhone was a mixed bag.  I loved the poker game Texas hold em.  I think this is an Apple authored game and its really fun.  The graphics are stunning and th way it flips from one on one interaction with the players and their short video’s to a table layout when you rotate the phone is dead sexy.  The iPhone browser is also hands down the best thing going on a mobile device right now.  I’m using the opera 9.5 beta and its pretty fantastic but it’s not quite the same as using mobile safari.  The iPhone screen has allot to do with this perception I think.  The real estate and resolution make for a fantastic mobile web experience.  My Kaiser is only 320×240 resolution compared to the iPhone 480×320, and the way you access tabs and zooming on the iPhone rocks.

As I played around on my friends iPhone I think I’m ok with the on screen keyboard.  I even think I’d still happy with an iPhone as I ultimately decided a few weeks ago but the lack of multitasking really has me down and reconsidering right now.  I don’t see how the notifications they are going to enable this fall are really going to give me the same feel as being able to run about 6 applications at the same time like I can on my Kaiser.

The Windows Mobile today screen gets bashed allot for being ulgy and busy but I honestly hope they don’t change it much in windows mobile 7.  It may not be the prettiest thing but you sure can pack allot of information on there and get snippits from lots of different sources coagulated into one screen.  I feel like there is a lack of information on the iPhone when I turn it on.  I’m so used to having my eyes blasted with all my pertinent info when I turn on my phone and the today screen pops up.  Maybe its the techie in me but having lots of buttons and gauges isn’t a bad thing in my book.

I still think I’d be happy on an iPhone due primarily to the web experience but I think I’m going to do one more windows mobile phone and see what lies in store with windows mobile 7 coming hopefully early next year.  I promise this is the last time I’ll change my mind, for real, at least this week.