abstractwankery.com

Why does Twitter suck?
This morning, my manager asked if I used Twitter at all. While I have an account, and I have a bunch of 'Friends' on there, my attention span for the service has never really lasted much longer than 2-3 days. Every time someone asks me about it, I grab a client or two, try things out, and realize yet again how many things really annoy me about the service. The top two were how much of a pain it was to post, and what a bigger pain it was to keep a feed going. The best I could find for OS X was Twitterrific, and it was just counterintuitive. The free version would put ads in, the 'auto reappear' never did, and it would just silently fail half the time and not post anything new for hours. Awesomesauce.

Granted, a few things have been fixed. The SMS posting service makes it really easy to actually post remotely, as none of the S60 clients are very good, and the Java clients really suck. They don't seem to be down as much, and the speed isn't terrible. Rumor has it, they're getting rid of Ruby on Rails, which just makes me jump with glee.

Since then, for posting, someone put together an AppleScript called Tweet, which allows you to easily post to Twitter through QuickSilver. It works well for me, I just hit Command-Space, hit period, type my tweet, tab, then tweet it. It sounds complicated, but it's really easy to deal with. I like it, and it was easy as hell to do.

Then, there's the feed problem. RSS is too slow, I don't want it cluttering up Google Reader. Twitterrific still isn't working for me, as pretty as it is. There are two Dashboard modules, and neither of them work well, and silently fail at that. What I really wanted was something that would just post tweets to Growl and be done with it. I found something, but it was a Ruby script with manual configuration and little extensibility. I didn't want to screw with it, so off to /dev/null it went.

Hey, there's a point.

In the end, I wrote a perl script called TwitterGrowl to do exactly what I want it to do. To make life easier, it relies on the Twitter login information in your keychain to log in, and prompts you to create one if it doesn't find anything. It reports when there's a login failure, or Twitter goes into Suckfest, or when a system maintenance issue is posted. Better yet, I packaged it up into an easy to use, double clickable application. Pop it into your Applications folder, drag it to your Login Items, and it'll go into the background and sign in when you log in. Easy as pie. All of the required modules are in the application package, and you can feel free to browse the source by viewing the package contents and heading into the Resources folder.

So, now that I have a steady "works for me", would anyone else like to give it a shot and see if anything breaks? Comment here with any issues or comments you find, and if no one posts, it either works great or I am a total failure. :)

TwitterGrowl 0.1 (Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5, Universal)

It seems most of my entries in this blog are something along the lines of, "Hey, sorry for the long time without posting, maybe I'll post something interesting soon!"

Yet, I never do.

I've been on LiveJournal for seven years, and I bet I have at least four of those a year on there, too.

Sorry about that.

Anyone who has been involved with the "forbidden" osx86 scene, or the ability to run Mac OS X on generic PC hardware, likely knows the name netkas. Netkas created the EFI firmware emulator that brings the osx86 distribution of OS X closer to the real thing by emulating the EFI Apple uses in their modern hardware. EFI is Intel's replacement for BIOS, closely resembling OpenFirmware, that allows both the interface to hardware from the software layer as well as providing direction and configuration for said hardware. The EFI emulation layer has opened the doors for more graphics hardware support, booting from GUID Partition Table hard disks, and more. It also allows osx86 users with compatible hardware (Intel chipsets and Core Solos or higher) to use Apple's OS X kernel, rather than waiting for a hacked and patched version from the community.

A company called Psystar recently exploded into the news by openly announcing a commercially sold "hackintosh". They're offering what is essentially a white box PC, with off the shelf parts that match or closely match what Apple is offering in their hardware, pre-installed with Mac OS X 10.5. Their sales pitch is that they're effectively selling an expandable Mac, with more power than an iMac, for less than half the cost. They're bundling a legal copy of Leopard, the Netkas EFI v8 emulator, and Apple's bundled software, as a complete package. It's a license violation to do this, as Apple's EULA specifically forbids using Leopard on hardware that is not Apple-branded.

The funny part to this story is that Netkas is all pissed off that Psystar is using his EFI emulator in a commercial product. He has since re-released EFI v8 with a new license forbidding the use of the software for commercial purposes. Now, if anyone just noticed that, Netkas is pissed off that Psystar is violating his license agreement by bundling software that allows people to violate Apple's license agreement.

Right, then.

As I feared, Nokia has absolutely no plan or desire to upgrade a handset to a new S60 software release. I'm not sure how likely I am to buy Nokia my next time around, which annoys me to no end.

I really enjoy their phones, they are solid and well built. The Symbian operating system is easily one of the best on the market right now, but Microsoft is working very hard on Windows Mobile, and Apple's iPhone offers an unbeatable user experience. With the iPhone, you get vendor and provider lock in, and with Windows Mobile, you get Windows. Nokia doesn't concentrate very hard on the US market, with delayed US 3G releases, and my provider just doesn't care about Nokia at all.

Who knows what I'm going to get next. Maybe I'll be waiting for a Google Android device.

I have a great idea for a web application, something nice and bubbly for people to hook into.

A random number generator.

You get a certain number of uses per month. We hire three or four people to roll dice, and input the result into the system. Each API call shifts the next value off the top.

I'm going to be rich.

Those who know me are aware that I get very loyal to a brand when they treats me well. Many times, that brand loyalty doesn't make sense to those around me, and I've come to accept that, even if I try to convert people. I was a fan of Apple, even during their dark times, though that has waned a little bit. I am a huge Chrysler fan, though the past couple of years have been lackluster. I do blame that on Daimler.

I really love Nokia products, too. I've owned five of their handsets (3390, 3650, 6682, 9300, and E61i), and two of their internet tablets (770, N800). One thing that really drives me nuts about Nokia is their software updates, or their lack of software updates. Back before the 6682, it was impossible to get software updates for your phone unless you managed to find a Nokia Service Center, an impossible task in the United States, or you downloaded a pirated copy of their Phoenix software and managed to find a pirated release of their firmware. Last year, Nokia started offering software updates to consumers via their Nokia Software Updater, supporting all of the S60v3 handsets, N and E series handsets, and the last of the S60v2 series. They've even started including S40 handsets on a limited basis. Mind you, this was last year, and those with Windows Mobile smartphones have been getting major software updates for a few years now.

Since then, Blackberry has entered the consumer market after dominating the US business market, and Apple introduced the iPhone as a consumer smartphone, and when their 2.0 software comes out, will start taking chunks out of the business market as well. Both companies are offering major software updates after the hardware purchase, without requiring a hardware upgrade every time they add a major feature. Nokia continues to only offer bug fixes.

I really appreciate the fact that we get bug fixes and all of that, but with the new competition out there, it would really be nice if we weren't dropping over $400 on new handsets, only to have them obsoleted within a year. Whenever I bring this up on one of Nokia's blogs, it is either ignored, or a Nokia apologist starts talking about how the hardware matches the software or some other nonsense. It's like Apple fanboys, I swear.

I think I'm just ranting. But at least I took the opportunity to rant to Nokia Support. I have a strong feeling I won't get a good answer from them.

Looks like we're starting to get an idea together for the new Cocoa Touch platform. Stay tuned. :)

In other news, the www.whatthefuck.com relaunch has been going really well. Some old timers have come back, and the site is more stable than it ever has been. The speed is still up to snuff too, even though we're using a platform far more abstracted than the original. The original was self rolled Perl, embedded HTML, no CGI.pm, no templating, self-created cookies, the whole shebang. The new system is using the Catalyst Framework as the core, with DBIx::Class for database abstraction, Template Toolkit for the viewable HTML and XML, and utility processes using the Moose OO Framework for Perl. I'm quite happy with the result, with the manageability and maintainability, and the speed I get through FastCGI on Apache.

I've started doing a call out to users on new features and suggestions. From the latest list I put out, I think that after the first half is complete, I'll be ready to do a full launch of the site and start getting the word out.

Oh, and I fixed commenting on the blog. Sorry about that.

Yesterday morning, Apple introduced what they're calling the Cocoa Touch SDK, otherwise known as the iPhone SDK. This development toolkit allows developers familiar with Objective-C the ability to create applications for the iPhone or iPod Touch platform, and provides a distribution method through Apple's App Store.

The development kit includes beta of the updated XCode, supporting "iPhone Application" as a development target, supporting libraries and frameworks, documentation, and "Aspen Simulator", a virtual iPhone for testing purposes. I played around with the new development environment for about 30 minutes, successfully creating a little "Hello, world!" application, and then toyed around with the simulator for a while. I'm surprised at how complete the simulator is, especially compared to the virtual device given with the Maemo development toolkit (the underlying platform for Nokia's Internet Tablet devices, the 770, N800, and N810). You have full access to Mobile Safari for testing web applications, as well as the Photos application and the Contacts application, presumably for developers to be able to test integration with core Touch services. Through option-clicking the interface, you're able to emulate the pinching feature of the multi-touch interface, and really able to exploit many of the features without using the actual device. I think it provides a really great interface to piece together a good application, requiring an actual device only later on in the development process, so you don't mar a phone from the getgo. Quite a bit easier than Symbian or Maemo development, and roughly equivalent to Windows Mobile development. The only thing WinMo has on them at this point is that their interface development features within Visual Studio are far more mature -- Interface Builder is not yet available in the development kit beta. You're drawing canvasses on your own. ;)

Last night, Apple released something like 20 videos over iTunesU at the iPhone Dev Center on getting started with iPhone development. I'm hoping to start going through them this weekend, and see what I can come up with. I'm not necessarily chasing the millions in VC funding that is being offered, I just like to create cool things. I don't actually have a device yet, but this has moved me to think about picking up an iPod Touch in the next few weeks.

I still can't bring myself to leave T-Mobile to get an iPhone, and having to reunlock my device every time there's a software update really doesn't do it for me. :)