Twitterified Client now fully Open-Source
Find the announcement here.
And, of course, find the source code at GitHub: here.
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Chris’ Weekly High-Protein Tweets
If you are drowning in Twitter updates or simply missed a few of my Tweets, here is a list of what I consider worth reading this week.
By that, I mean that less interesting, personal and topical tweets are not in this list. This list will be published every week, save the occasional attack of laziness.
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Twitterified v1.3 is out: bug fixes, usability improvements, Present.ly support
Well, the title pretty much says it all: v1.3 is out and it’s an evolutionary release.
- Bug fixes – lots of ‘em
- Usability improvements, such as text overflow indicator
- Support for the awesome Present.ly Twitter-compatible protocol
Get it while it’s hot!
(If you are confused as to where to get it, all you need is to go to http://twitterified.com, log in and follow this link)
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Twitterified Client v1.3 Almost Ready
I should be able to release this new client tomorrow or day after tomorrow.
I am currently battling a couple bugs with beta support for Present.ly:
- Time zone discrepancy: all posts appear as seven hours behind
- Avatars are too big!
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A quick-fix for the Tweetback spam issue
I do not get it. I am a big fan of Smashing Magazine and I think that it was very nice of @jdevalk to write a plug-in that gives us full control over “Tweetbacks”. See this blog entry.
Where Smashing Magazine and the author lose me, though, is that I have not seen any reaction, either on the magazine’s web site, or the author’s blog, regarding the issue that many blogs who installed the plug-in seem to now be suffering: they are being inundated with thousands of spammy Tweetbacks, most of them containing text like “This is a test”, presaging a potentially much more virulent attack when the spammers get their tool working.
In fact, it may not be spam, but simply some tests gone wrong, but whatever the reason it caused grief to many blog owners — including me.
After de-activating the plug-in, here is the SQL command you can use to get rid of these Tweetbacks:
delete from wp_comments where comment_author_url like 'http://twitter.com/%/statuses/%'; |
If you do not have access to your database, contact me, I may end up writing a short plug-in that will wrap this query.
Again, I really like Smashing Magazine and that is why I am very surprised by their silence on this issue.
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A very geeky Holidays break
Was your break as geeky as mine? Come on, admit it: you’ve done at least one incredibly unsexy thing in the last couple weeks. I know I have. Well, in fact, I had to take a four weeks-long break and it shows in the number of silly things I’ve played with.
In no particular order:
- I improved this blog’s look — well, I like to think that I have:

- I finally created a personalized Twitter page:

- I also created a Twitter page for Twitterified:

- I created an icon set call “More Blaqua“:

- I added a drawer to the Twitterified client – you will see why sometime in January, hopefully!

(Oh, and I finally mastered transparency in Flex, too! Yay)
- I started separating nextBBS v2’s components so that the framework can be used on its own and the message board part is now a module.
It is the first MVC PHP framework that seamlessly support plug-ins.
- I added to nextBBS v2 a limited amount of compatibility with Wordpress plug-ins.
I re-read Getting Things Done by David Allen and made a new year resolution to stick with the program, this time.
So far my Inbox is empty and my tasks list still is a manageable size…
I have installed Medialink on my iMac and use it to stream Divx movies to my PS3. Works flawlessly.
I have also installed PlayOn! in Parallels to stream Netflix. I wish there was an equivalent program for OS X. Well, I “kind of” wish because Netflix’s streaming choice is not that exciting. Not to mention that Netflix innovates by being, to my knowledge, the first company to proudly blog about letting go 50 employees.
- I setup an old P4 with Nexentra. The project bills itself as “The land of free and open source distribution combining OpenSolaris kernel with Ubuntu userland.”
In fact I installed it because I wanted to create a ZFS array. Unfortunately the clunky old PC is way too noisy. Fortunately I realized that a read-write implementation of ZFS for Leopard is available at Mac OS Forge.
- I cancelled XM Radio. They had been annoying me for quite a while, inserting their stupid advertisements in talk radio channels, and now that they merged with Sirius they got rid of some channels I happened to like so, good riddance XM, welcome free radios on my iPhone! — and ironically but quite logically I have better reception in tunnels.
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Twitterified 1.2 is out: multi-accounts, mouse gestures, visual ignore…
Based on the very helpful feedback I received from the Twitterified client users, here is version 1.2’s log:
- Multiple accounts support:
– Multiple accounts using the same server
– Accounts using multiple servers (Twitter, Identi.ca…)
– Underlying architecture to eventually support any third-party server as long as they are compatible
- Better error reporting
- Better error recovery
- Mouse Gestures support
- Tweets can now be marked “read”
- Obviously new tweets are now easily identifiable
- The application window height is now a setting
- It is now possible to “ignore” someone using the collapsable boxes
Due to the client’s support for multiple accounts, if you are upgrading, you will have to re-enter your credentials. It’s a one-time thing.
Note, too, that starting with v1.1, the client offers to update automatically when a new version is out.
Sorry, Jeremiah, ignoring you for the purpose of this demo…
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Use Mouse Gesture to mark all Tweets “read”
If you are not using Twitterified yet, go get it!
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Twitterified…at last!
I cannot believe that it took me so long to get my ducks in a row.
First, Twitterified was entirely written in Javascript, like most AIR clients. But some testing showed that rewriting in AS3 would dramatically increase responsiveness.
Then, I had to work on my web framework while creating twitterified.com. And finally I was only able to offer a decent video thanks to the overall godness offered by Vimeo.
But hey, here it is! For a limited period of time, if you go to the invite page and enter the code “nexus”, you will be automatically added to the private beta program.
Twitterified powers up your Twitter experience, allowing it to compete with the “new kids”: Pownce, Friendfeed, etc.
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The Twitter Exponential Argument
A quick note: I was reading Techcrunch earlier today, when I realized that I could not reconcile their post “Twitter at scale: Will it work?” with my views on how to build a scalable application.
Nick Cubrilovic contends that “Every new Twitter user and every new connection results in an exponentially greater computational requirement.”
And yet, I fail to see the exponential quality of it all.
It looks like Nick is saying: “I have U users, posting P posts, read by F followers. Hence, if I were to draw this on paper, I would end up with an exponential slope.”
That’s odd because, as I understand Twitter’s architecture, we indeed have U people posting P posts – BTW, P is unknown, and as Twitter goes I’d wager that the f(P) curve would be logarithmic; but I digress. Let’s, for simplicity’s sake, consider the total number of posts and call it X.
Now, Nick would obviously be referring to a f(F) curve. If F followers have to monitor X posts, then yes, I expect the slope to be exponential.
But that’s not how it works: Twitter is a pull service; each Twitter client regularly asks the server(s): “Do you have anything for me?” The server replies: “No” or “Yes, these x posts.” “x”, not “X” because only relevant posts are retrieved.
Since “F” is bound to be much bigger than “x”, and the overheard of retrieving multiple posts is very small compared to the time elapsed between two polls, it seems to me that the formula we should use here is that of a linear approximation.
Just my 2 cents. My math is *very* rusty but it seems to me that Nick’s argument doesn’t hold water.
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