For iOS users.  Right now you cannot download from the Apple store until they do the next javascript update.  If you want it now, set your phone to ‘developer mode‘ and then download the file.  Download NewsSnacker here.

Update 1:  The link finally showed up in the App store.  However, if you search NewsSnacker, it will not find it, but if you search twitter + news it finds it!  Odd eh?

https://apps.getpebble.com/applications/540fa3a2df71d3eb2e000021

Future plans:

• Currently I have 5 news sources; however I may add a few more.
• Offer custom twitter lists for $1.99 a year.  Basically you tell me what you want to see and I’ll code it up.
• Tap on your watch and get the first ~300 words of the story. Expand to ~900 later.
• Click ‘save to read later’.  Not sure how I will go about this yet.
• Thoughts????  Open to suggestions.

I had a quick look at the Twitter blog to see of there was any warnings of something new with the API.  Nothing jumped out at me but I did notice that something was changing from 32 bits to 64 bits.  I did not pay it much mind.  As I was debugging I finally decided to get the keys from the twitter site and manually start making some calls. The site started working again.  What the heck?  I checked my SQL statements and I was getting data from the database.  Then I looked at the last 4 digits just to see of perhaps my tokens got corrupted or something.  They do not match!  For the first 4 digits DO match!  Then it stuck me.  I quickly logged into the database and yup, just as I thought.  I had my fields set to textvar fields set to 40 charters.  Default.  Arrggg.. All this work and it was just the keys getting larger.

I changed to token fields to 64 each and everything started working again.  Well mostly again because I introduced new errors and founds some weakness in the codes that I never noticed before.  That was one afternoon shot to hell.

So if you suddenly find your twitter app is not working anymore, check you database schema, could be a quick fix and save you a few hours.

Before we go any further, this is for Android only.  I’m SURE there is a way to do it for iOS, but I gave up my iPhone once iOS7 came along.  But that is another story.

First we need to build the task.  If you are not familiar with Tasker there are a number of very good sites that can walk you through how to set up Tasker and how to create basic tasks.  I will go step by step, but will not provide a detailed explanation as to how it works.

First download and install Tasker.  Be sure to load it.

Next download and install Pebble Tasker.

Next download and install Pebble Notifier.

Now lets create a Profile and a Task.

Open up Tasker and click on the + button for a new profile

From the Popup select Event.  I normally name them ‘Holder 1->n’ Since they have no real value. However, you might want to name them after what you are going to really use it for.  So in this case, I would recommend you call it NewsSnacker News.

From the Event Popup, select UI.

From the Select UI Event Popup, select Button Widget.  What we are creating is a dummy Event. We just need something for the Pebble to point to.

You can label this anything you want.  We are done here.  Click the icon at the top left to finish this step.

The next step is to create the event.  That will be the next popup.  Click on ‘New Task’.  If you closed out the new popup window, you can manually add a task instead.

Select ‘Net’

select ‘HTTP Get’

In the following screen, we are going to make a call to the NewsSnacker site.  This works because I wrote a PHP script to get the twitter feed, format it such that it can display on the pebble and drop it into a text file.  That is the file you are going to access.

Fill out the following on the screen.

Click on the icon at the top left, and we will add another task.  Click on the ‘+’ button at the bottom center of the screen.

This time select the task ‘Alert’  Then ‘Notify’.  Fill out the following.  BTW, a good test is to add another task -> Alert -> HTML Popup or Popup.

This will display the news on your screen.  However, there is a but (at least for me) that does not display it correctly all the time.  In fact, most of the time it does not display correctly.  However, we do have a work around.  First, lets test what we have.  Lets update the Pebble.

Open Pebble Tasker.

Click on the top pull down and lets add the Task we just created.  As you can see from my screenshot, I already have a few Tasks defined.  Now you may wonder, why did we need to create the Event if we are calling tasks?  I dont know.  All I know is it does not work for me if I do not do it this way.

Once you have selected your Task, lets update the watch.  Click on the bottom left of your phone and choose ‘Set watch to default tasks’

So we are ready to go.  I took some screenshots on my watch.  Lets see if you can follow along.

So we can see it KINDA works.  I’m getting the news, its just that the notifier is not working.  However, if we then load Pebble Notifications, we can see the last notification on the phone.  In this case, the news…

And there you are.  There is still a limit as to how much text can be loaded through the notifier, but I’m hoping that in future releases, they will extend this limit a bit so that I can read all the text.

ENJOY!!!

https://dev.twitter.com/blog/api-v1-is-retired

I have two apps that died, TwittFilter and NewsSnacker.  TwittFilter is a pretty large and dense program, so I’m not sure when or if I will get around to updating it.  NewsSnacker I use almost every day.  Sigh. I will have to add OAuth to the calls.  Shame.  It was nice when you could just write a few lines in PHP and boom you have a feed.  Fun.

Still, I think it will be immediate embraced and enforced in the country of the most likely suspects. As we have seen during the Twitter revolution and the Arab spring, Twitter is already world wide and having an impact, so much so some of the more repressive reserves could block Twitter out all together. So to keep markets open, they needed to adapt the line that different countries have “different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression”. Shame.

But before you go off on Twitter, keep in mind Google and other search engines have been doing this for years with China being the most visible example. So I guess its just a sign of the times.  As social media matures; it becomes more powerful. As it becomes more powerful, it becomes a threat to the power holders.  As bad as it sounds, I somehow take comfort in knowing people are connecting and its providing an impact, else this policy would have never been pushed in the first place.

So when I found out about Topify decided not to update to the latest changes at Twitter, I was sympathetic.  And this I started to wonder.  Is there any reason to keep writing things on the Twitter API?  Yes and No.  Depends on what you are trying to do.

If you are trying to build something that is somewhat core, overlapping anything that the site can do, I would just stop now. Think about any service you are offering that would have have mass appeal, or fixes a failure on Twitter’s side that you know could be fixed if they just stepped up.  Just walk away.  This would fit in to the advice that Twitter gave to developers to stop building clients that just access Twitter.

However, if you are building very specific things, as I do, that have a feature or approach that is not complimentary to a logical next step for twitter to build, then you may want to keep it running.  For example, most of what I write is never seen. I tend to write a lot of very simple bots that do simple special jobs. Things a company like Twitter would find distracting because its not part of their core offering.

And if you think the rate of new apps would be slowing down since the latest changes in Twitter, you would be wrong.  On July 11, 2011, Twitter crossed the 1 million apps line.  From the Twitter blog.

As an ecosystem, we’ve just crossed one million registered applications, built by more than 750,000 developers around the world. This is up from 150,000 apps just a year ago.  A new app is registered every 1.5 seconds, fueling a spike in ecosystem growth in the areas of analytics, curation and publisher tools.

Now many of the changes that have really missed off developers have only been on the last few months, so who knows what the numbers will be in the 4th Quarter, but clearly, there are plenty of people out with idea and needs for interacting with Twitter that is not covered by the current system and important enough to keep up with the changes in the Twitter eco system.  And we should take these numbers with a grain of salt. How many of these million apps are still being used much less being updated to reflect changes with the API?

Twitter has also been investing and improving its developers pages. The new pages are much cleaner and as I’m told by my friends at Twitter, the API docs are more accurate.

• Discussions – We need a place to talk with each other that gives us more functionality than we have now.
• Developer Blog – The new blog provides a place to learn about important API announcements, events, tips and how-tos, case studies on great apps, product insights, and more.
• Better Documentation – The docs have better structure and searchability and should feel more intuitive.
• Improved Apps Management – The new app manager has a streamlined design that provides more comprehensive information for your app.
• Enhanced Search – Powered by Apache Solr, searching the new dev.twitter.com also got a boost. We have a unified search engine with filters and expect results to be more relevant. Also, we can search the archive from our Groups mailing list.

A footnote here, FaceBook has a FAR larger rate of new applications being installed everyday.  However, FaceBook just had it first event of upsetting developers when the story broke of the deep cooperation between Facebook and Zynga.

The following is a post on the Topify site:

A week ago, without any prior notice, Twitter changed their backend resulting in removing headers from their emails which we used to provide you the Topify service. Once I discovered about this change, I asked on their official developers support forum about it and twice sent a mention to @TwitterAPI account. All of these were unanswered until today. Today they finally posted a clarification:

Many of the emails we send have X-Twitter* headers in them, with pieces of information about the event which triggered them. You might have noticed we’ve started decommissioning these headers.

If for some reason you were using these headers programmatically in order to detect / process events, you should stop doing it and switch to one of the means supported by the API. For example, the Streaming API. Please let us know if you needed help or if you had questions!

(from: https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/708)

I considered switching to using the Streaming API in the past, but the only option for Topify is to use the Site Streams version of it. But Site Streams are still in beta, and according to the documentation there is no estimated date for it to exit beta. Considering this last episode and other actions by Twitter in the past year, I have no desire to experiment with their beta offerings. Not only this can result in unstable service for you, they might just shut it down one day.

Then I looked at the app on the iTunes dev store and though, well wait, there is a use case, be it rare. Say you are on vacation and plan on disconnecting for a week or so.  Then yea, I can see an auto reply “IF” its well controlled.   What concerns me is the possibility it will autoreply TOO much.  In other words, there is a conversation you started and suddenly you are auto replying to every new message thus spamming those that left messages before you.  Worse, if you auto reply to every mention in a tweet, that can get REALLY annoying.

Assuming these issues can be addressed, this is a pretty straight forward app.  Set and end data and time, then give it a label.  Done. Perhaps you go camping once a month, then you can simply update the preset.

I sent an email to the person who created this and I’m waiting for a reply.  I still think its a bit much to feel the need to autoreply twitter and facebook, but as long as there are strong controls to guard against spamming other people, this could be a useful app when traveling or just taking an extended break from SocMed every now and then … which I recommend.

{UPDATE}

Nice eh?  Course, the twitterverse had a field day on this one.  The guy from the redner group apolgied, but too late.  I have a feeling Take-Two Interactive will not be working with these guys again..  So now what?  You just tweet that which must not be tweeted.. Well first you man up and apologize..

So what can they now?  I heard they have been calling / emailing major reviewers saying sorry, and this may blow over in time, and there are plenty of clients NOT in the gaming industry they can still chase, but for awhile, life is going to be a bit tough at Redner.   So TIL NEVER tweet in anger…. never.

I grabbed a few I like as an example. You can check the site, or check out wired’s collection.

Page from my upcoming Book. Twitter api in 24 hours.

Well, what could that mean from a few points of view.   First the user.  I think BusinessInsider did a pretty good job with their mockup showing what it could mean to have fully integrated twitter support in iOS. From a design point of view, it will be pretty minimal, an extra button on a menu and one more share option. I will place some of the shots at the end of this post, but you can view them all from the link above.

For Twitter its HUGE!  To have the ability to read and write tweets embedded in the phone will make socMed sharing just as easy and sharing vie email or MMS. This could give Twitter that extra edge to level up with Facebook. (unless we will hear of a Facebook integration in the near term).  Also, if Apple is going to go through the trouble of integrating twitter API calls, and the required OAuth to make it happen, then we could see simple native twitter functionality integrated into other elements of the iphone including a type of address book as seen in my hobby app TwittFilter.com

Finally to the programmer.  Currently, adding twitter API support to any iOS app is less then painless, mostly because of OAuth, XAuth and the changes around authentication.  If there were simple class calls the programmer could make to gain access to the Twitter API, you could see a massive explosion of various apps including some form of socMed sharing via Twitter.  Another big win for Twitter.

Now what does Apple get out of all this?  At first glance, seems like nothing.  But what if integration and cooperation between Twitter and Apple continue?  Perhaps one of them has a revenue plan that could shin both of their pennies. … or given Apples massive money and lack of presence in socMed, partial buy out?

Either way, this little announcement could imply something much bigger then just a button showing up in a menu popup.  This is something to watch.  And how facebook reacts will be noteworthy as well.

Anyway, here are some pics from BI