What I Think a Mobile Twitter App Should Be

Author: Joel Nagy

22 Apr

I’ve been using TwitterBerry for my BlackBerry Storm, but I don’t quite love it so much as I use more and more desktop and web based apps. I feel like there are some features that I need, that would make things easier. So until I have the time to learn the BlackBerry SDK and write my app, I’m going to list out what I think is important and useful.

Multiple Accounts - (for Corporate and Personal) all tweets from people you follow will be integrated into main list and have capability to have color coding
Groups - The app will have grouping capabilites (along with automated groupings (such as per account groupings and recent friends etc…) and groups can be accessed by swiping sideways on the list view (also the abiity to hide groups from swiping and only view from group list availble from main menu)
Tweet Caching - The ability to cache a tweet while you are not able to access a mobile signal
In-app Flagging - for followup gets added to the “Flagged” automatic Group
Search tweets of my friends - You know you recall a friend that tweeted about something particular, so search only within those tweets

So this is the start of my “favourite” twitter mobile app. I’ll add more as I come up with more ideas and wishes. Let me know what ideas you think are important or ones you think don’t work for you.

UPDATE: Here’s another feature I’d like it to have as well:

Email tweets or add to social bookmarking service like del.icio.us

2 Comments

Filed under: Thoughts

Posting to WordPress and Updating Twitter from BlackBerry

Author: Joel Nagy

3 Mar

Building off my previous entry Posting to WordPress via BlackBerry I’ve updated my wp-mail.php script to work with twitter_updater. It’s not the best solution but it works for now.

require_once(ABSPATH.'/wp-content/plugins/twitter_updater/twitter_updater.php');

do_action('publish_phone', $post_ID); // current update to WP

if (function_exists(vc_doTwitterAPIPost)) { // if twitter_updated exists: update
	$twitterURI = "/statuses/update.xml";
	$twit = $post_title . ' ( ' . get_permalink($post_ID) . ' )';
	$sendToTwitter = vc_doTwitterAPIPost('status='. $twit, $twitterURI);
	echo "\n<p>" . sprintf(__('<strong>Twitter:</strong> %s : %s'), $sendToTwitter, wp_specialchars($post_title)) . '</p>';
}

I also made some other updates to compensate for some changes to my email system which now base64 encodes part of the message. Here I added this code to split at the “base64″ marker instead or “quoted-printable” marker:

if (strpos($content, "Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64") !== false) {
	$content = explode('Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64', $content);
	$base64 = true;
}
$content = $content[1];
if ($base64) $content = base64_decode($content);

0 Comments

Filed under: Code

Posting to WordPress via BlackBerry

Author: Joel Nagy

6 Feb

Yesterday, I posted my first post via BlackBerry after dealing with a few issues in WordPress that required a little modification to the wp-mail.php file. Seems that HTML emails don’t get through very well. So here are two basic steps to posting via email with your BlackBerry.

Set up your BlackBerry user account as an Author. From the Dashboard, go to Users and add the email account you use on your Blackberry, your name and a different login and password (you won’t really need these as this account is for email posting) and the Role to Author. Optionally, after you save go back to the new user and set the Display name as your name, so all posts look the same.

Now overwrite your wp-mail.php file with this one.

Here’s the code I changed:

if ($content_type == 'multipart/alternative') {
$content = explode('--'.$boundary, $content);
$content = $content[2];
$content = explode('Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable', $content);

// BlackBerry Conversion Code
$content = $content[0];
$BODY = strpos($content, '<BODY>');
if ($BODY !== false && $BODY > 0 && $body === false) $content =     substr($content, $BODY);
    $patterns = array ( '/<FONT FACE\=3D\"Verdana, Helvetica, Arial\"><SPAN STYLE\=3D\'font-size\:12\.0px\'>/',
        '/<\/SPAN><\/FONT>/',
        '/\=[\n\r]+/',
        '/<BODY>[\n\r]+/',
        '/<\/BODY>[\n\r]+/',
        '/<HTML>[\n\r]+/',
        '/<\/HTML>[\n\r]+/',
        '/<BR>/');
    $replace = array ('', '', '', '', '', '', '', '<br />');
    $content = preg_replace($patterns, $replace, $content) . '</p>'; // replace and add trailing P tag
    $content = strip_tags($content, '<img><p><br><i><b><u><em><strong><strike><span><div>');
} else if (stripos($content_transfer_encoding, 'quoted-printable') !== false) {
    $content = quoted_printable_decode($content);
}
$content = trim($content);

Try it out, let me know if you have any issues.

9 Comments

Filed under: Code

BlackBerry Storm: And the Beta Culture

Author: Joel Nagy

5 Feb

I’ve been using the new Storm now for about two weeks. It of course has the later bug fixes which help with all the previously known problems that many users have experienced. For years people have always known that first time out products have flaws. My father always said to never buy a car the first year its made, they need time to work things out. Today though with the “eternal” betas of Google we live in a beta culture. Before Google most beta programs and products were relegated to a select few. Now everything is beta.

Is it okay? I love being the first to try out a new beta web site. But I won’t spend money on a beta product. So I waited and here I am now blogging with my BlackBerry Storm, loving the click keyboard, and of course happy with the reliable Verizon service. Some things are not worth the beta experience. TiVo first gen users have always complained about that, so our beta culture should be clear now on what it means to have a first gen product.

0 Comments

Filed under: Thoughts

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What I Think a Mobile Twitter App Should Be

Posting to WordPress and Updating Twitter from BlackBerry

Posting to WordPress via BlackBerry

BlackBerry Storm: And the Beta Culture

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