kosertech

I’ve started from scratch rewriting ceTwit for windows mobile pro. There were lots of things I wanted to clean up in the code base and it turned out to just be easier to start from scratch and get the code in a more maintainable format.

The big win for this version is some threading and timeline reloading even if the phone is sleeping with the screen off.

New features:

• Threading for speedier experience
• Copy tweet to clipboard
• Retweet
• Refresh even if phone sleeping
• Reply highlighting
• Timeline loads up to 200 tweets
• View twitters rate limit and your stats

Planning to release it in a week or so, There is a small pool of beta testers doing the hard work of finding all the bugs I missed. If you wish to participate send me a DM or use the sites contact form and I’ll shoot you an invite.

Here is a screencast of the new version

FriendFeed recently introduced an iPhone friendly version of its site with a few enhancements to make it render better on the iPhone.  A neat trick you can pull is to make a bookmark of this site and set it to open in your firefox sidebar.

Create the bookmark to http://www.friendfeed.com/i

Once you do that simply close it up and select the bookmark from the Bookmarks menu to get your new friendfeed sidebar to open.

I’ve been trying to figure out why the iPhone didn’t get a camera refresh or a storage bump in the 3g model.  Both things that would have been pretty much direct component swaps without much if any additional engineering effort.

I’ve come to the conclusion it’s to make me want a new model next year.  If they upgrade everything in the revision 1 to include 3G, double storage, 5 megapixel camera, A2DP etc… then I’m going to have no incentive to buy another one next year.  I would guess ultimately they also had an up front goal of getting that price as low as possible on the build construction.

I have a sneaky suspicion that each model is made only attractive enough to get me to want it over the current model.  I keep considering this and as time goes on I’m starting to lean toward the side of buying one again.

The other side of this is perhaps they put so much polish on getting the current features right that there wasn’t time to squeeze anything else in.  The App Store is likely a huge software effort to get it all up and running and integrated into iTunes.

I believe after the initial surge of lines out the door is over I’m going to take the plunge and get an iPhone 3G in the hopes that I’ll still be able to move the sim back to my other phones if I want to.  I’ve had windows mobile phones for years and years and I think it’s time I took a look at something else.  I get bored easy and windows mobile isn’t exciting me lately.  Maybe windows mobile 7 will make me want to swap back but it’s a long way off.  I’m in the habit of getting new phones every 6-12 months.

I have sworn up and down for years that I was operating system agnostic and it didn’t matter what I used but when I upgraded my laptop a month ago I went with a black MacBook primarily for form factor and i’ve been extremely happy.  I wish I’d made the jump years ago when OSX was released.

For some other musings that have lead up to this decision please have a read at my earlier posts

[iPhone and lack of local user storage]

[To iPhone or not to iPhone]

I’m currently using 3 microblogging networks, mostly I use twitter but I’ve developed a soft spot for Plurk.  It’s got some very nice features in conversation following and also some drawbacks in that the tools to view the timeline make it a bit overwealming to keep up with everything going on.  Jaiku is a bit of a mix of Plurk and twitter.

Comparing and contrasting the social microblogging networks is a subject for a much longer post.  I started using Ping.fm a week or so ago, thanks to @dickieadams for the hookup on the invite code.

Ping.fm is a service that lets you update your status on a ton of different networks.  I currently count 16 different networks that it can simultaniously update from one post.  There is allot of value in this.  Especially if you have a different set of friends across your social networks.

I mostly have a similar set of friends across all three services so I’m still undecided on the value of posting to all three of the above at the same time, it almost seems like I’m spamming my contacts with the same information.  I tend to do a mix of updating all of them or posting to individual services then replying to things on the individual services.

After using the Ping.fm for a week I have the following suggestion for the service.  They have to implement assured delivery.  If I’m going to trust them with relaying my message to all of my services then I need some kind of alert if they were unable to post to a certain network.  I know that they are likely not using official API’s to post to several services plurk for one has no officially published API yet so I’m guessing they duplicate the normal page form for the updates.

I had several plurk updates go unposted tonight and it’s left me somewhat untrusting of ping.fm for the time being.  I’m going to end up having to check on things I wanted to post to make sure they made it through and thats not really saving me any time by using ping.fm.

I think ping.fm has a ton of potential and I’m going to continue using it but I think they could really enhance their product by putting in some quality of service type status update verifications that would simply send me an email stating “Your status update ‘update text i wrote’ to twitter was unable to be posted please try again later”

if you want to give ping.fm a try head on over and sign up the current invite code is “letmeping”

In my ongoing internal struggle to decide if an iPhone is for me or not I started looking around last night for articles on how to use it as an ebook reader.  I’d like to do this and I’m sure some enterprising individual is going to come up with a solution that will work great with things from Project Gutenburg and pdf’s and hopefully iSilo and other formats that have been around for ages.

I found a few good solutions for online books, like Open Library’s online reader, and you could maintain your page by keeping a safari instance on your phone open to the site on the last page you read, and also use the squeeze to zoom the page in safari.  This is not to terrible considering all of the ebooks should be pretty slim downloads and a real ebook reader will probably implement some way to store the books in the local sandboxed sql storage each application can access.

This made me realize that it would be difficult to take a pdf from an email attachment and save it then open it in an ebook reader because as far as I know the iPhone has no traditional local shared storage among applications.  I see this as a pretty big shortcoming right now.  The iPhone is terribly powerful yet severely crippled it seems as I dig more into what I would have to sacrifice by changing over to one.

Lets take the following scenario for instance.  My wife emails me a great picture of our daughter she took on her phone, I want to save that and open it in my favorite image manipulation program from the application store, as far as I know there’s no way to do this right now.  Each application is sandboxed in it’s own area with it’s own non shared storage.  I open images and mp3’s in several different user written applications on my windows mobile phone pretty often.  An operation I do pretty often is take an image with the built in camera, save it to the SD card, open it in ceTwit to post the image to TwitPic, then upload it to flickr or possibly mail it off to someone else.

More to think about in my pondering of the iPhone, someone enlighten me if I have this wrong but I couldn’t find any information that was counter to this thinking.

Sure I could get around this all by jailbreaking a current iPhone 1 but I don’t want to do that. I want to use the device as it is and I want Apple to empower the user to use the device to it’s full potential.

Honestly, I can’t make up my mind.  After the WWDC keynote I was ready to throw down my $200 and join the happy iPhone camp.  As more time passes and the reality distortion field lifts I’m waffling back and forth about weather an iPhone would be a good device for me.  I spent about an hour typing solid on my friends iPhone in the notes applications today and decided to write up some thoughts about it.

There are a few things that bother me about the iPhone right now:

1. No A2DP support
2. Typing on the touchscreen sucks
3. The camera isn’t very good
4. No background running applications from the app store
5. No system level apps from app store, i.e. someone cant make a new keyboard with haptic
6. No Copy/Paste (whats up with this really?   so insane)

There are lots of great things going for the new iPhone though:

1. GPS (huzzah! I use this all the time on my winmo phone)
2. App store
3. Very slick interface
4. MobileMe
5. Next Generation OS
6. The browser freaking rocks

Things I commonly do with my current ATT Tilt

1. SSH access
2. A2DP
3. Instant Messaging with IM+ (always stays on, restablish after calls runs in background)
4. Web access
5. Slingbox
6. MS Live Search / Google Maps for turn by turn directions
7. Java Midlets

Of the above seven, I would loose the ability to do 2,3,7 right out of the box if I switched.  In theory A2DP could be added in a future update, and someone might port a midlet manager to the app store though I’m guessing this would be a very large undertaking.  I don’t see being able to run background applications anytime in the near future on the iPhone, Apple illustrated as much by trying to spin their push notification as a replacement for this.  It’s not that you can’t do some really cool stuff with the push architecture they are making available to the developers but It’s not a replacement for a true multitasking environment.

Decisions Decisions……

I fixed a couple of bugs in the open url functions that could cause a crash as well as adding in the Twitpic support into the smartphone version bringing the smartphone version in line with the touchscreen version.

Simply update via the about/check for upgrade in the program or

Get it on the download page [download]

ceTwit 1.4 is released , thanks to the folks that tried it out early and gave feedback.  Twitpic is an excellent service that allows you to upload a picture and cross posts it to twitter.

To update Twitpic:

1. Select Update from the right soft key
2. Type a short message, Shorter than twitter.
3. Select menu/attach pic
4. Find a jpg file and attach it
5. Upload

After several requests I decided to add Twitpic support into ceTwit.  Nab it on the download page or update via the about page from within ceTwit.

(I need to add a character counter on the message box in the next version)

[download]

I got a bug report from Eric tonight around 8:30 EST, he indicated he could not open links from the context menu. This bug had to do with stylus activation of the context menu not selecting the tweet below the stylus. I added event handler traps for the mouse down and a timer to correctly handle this.

Get the new version to correct the bug. Thanks again to Eric for reporting the issue, User feedback is really what makes for the best applications.

Hit the download page to update or use the in application “check for upgrade” [download]

I cleaned up the menu items making them a little easier to use, “refresh” is now two clicks away instead of 3. I moved the support for external services into its own submenu on the context menu to get the context menu a more reasonable size.

New Features:

• Blue border for highlighted tweet (much more readable)
• Added support for Quotably
• Added “Last Network Transfer” dialog to show last returned api data
• In the event of a network error on the api call the timeline will no longer clear
• Network Error displayed in title bar in the event of a network error

I’m open to suggestions on the timeline display, I’d like to improve it without the programming being horribly complex so if anyone has suggestions feel free to send them to me @vkoser.

You can upgrade your device from the application via menu/settings/about then menu/check for update

or download it via the download page [download]