Don’t really need to say much at the moment, just that I’ve officially launched Hahlo to the public tonight. For those of you not familiar with what hahlo is, its a slick iPhone style interface for twitter.
All you need to get started is a twitter account, there are no additional signups needed for hahlo. You don’t even need an iPhone, hahlo will work in any good standards compliant browser (untested in IE), and you can even make good use of it in your Firefox sidebar.
10 days ago I launched my prototype iPhone ‘app’. Honestly I didn’t think there would be any interest in it, and I just did it as a little bit of self amusement. I may have been wrong. It got dugg and received over 15,000 visits in two days….which including several visits from actual iPhones….which is very interesting.
For those of you that may not know what I’m even talking about, I’m referring to my Twitter ‘app’ for the iPhone. Initially I was going to call it simple iTweetr, but that changed when I discovered a couple of days later that there was actually already an application call Tweetr, which was just to similar. I decided a new name was needed, and I settled on something a little more generic. Why? Because my grand plans for hahlo stretch beyond just Twitter…
What is hahlo? Putting it simply, it is (for the moment) just an interface for the great twitter service, but styled to work well on the iPhone. That said however, there is nothing to stop you using hahlo in your regular browser, there is nothing that will prevent that (well, maybe Internet Explorer, but…).
Right now you can signup for the beta which will be beginning in the next couple of days. I haven’t finished everything off yet, but there is enough for people to start testing. So far I’ve got the following crossed off my list:
The big goal for the next couple of days is to get the update functionality working, because a twitter app isn’t much without the ability to actually update your tweets. Then there are also the fancy urls which I have to sort out as well as organising the menus, icons layouts etc. All in all theres quite a bit to do by next Friday.
Yes I want to have a working, usable version ready to roll on the 29th for the iPhone launch. After the 29th its your feedback that will be very useful to me. Since I live in Australia, and we’re not expecting the iPhone until something next year, I’m not going to be able to test it first hand on the device itself.
If you’re interested (…and why wouldn’t you be) then scoot over to hahlo.com and signup for more information about the beta. Any and all feedback is welcome, if you have something in particular you would like hahlo to be able to do, or even if theres something you would rather it didn’t do, I’d love to hear it.
http://dev.deanjrobinson.com/iphone/twitter.html
After watching the WWDC keynote today, I got a little inspired (just a little). So I started thinking what could potentially be used with the iPhone.
I think twitter is perfectly suited for the iPhone, and sure you could use the standard Twitter page or you could use something like this. Its only a concept at the moment, but it shows how it could be displayed.
When I get a chance I’ll make it a ‘working demo’ which will actually use a real twitter feed, but for now have a look, I’d be glad to hear you thoughts.
UPDATE: I’ve spent some more time on it today. Its now displaying the json feed of my ‘friends timeline’. I’ve also mocked up an update box, as well as made it scrollable as it would be on the iPhone. Thats probably all I’ll do on it this week, but once my exams are out of the way next week I’ll continue.
About a week or so ago, a new competition was first announced on weblogtoolscollection.com, to design a ‘skin’ for the Sandbox theme. For those that don’t know about Sandbox, you can find out all about it over at the official page. The challenge involves designing a skin (not a theme) to be used with Sandbox. That means no PHP changes or additions, its all got to be done with CSS and images.
Perfect. This gives me the opportunity to play around with a ‘lite’ theme, but without the need for me to spend countless hours messing around in the (at times intricate) inner workings of the php code. I can just focus on a clean, nice layout. CSS and images, nothing more, nothing less.
Regulars might recall I was considering building a ‘lite’ theme myself earlier in the year. So lets think of this as the opportunity to cross that off my todo list. The rules of the competition mean that I can’t release or show the theme until the competition closes, but rest assured on the 2nd of August (I think thats the date) you will get a look at what I have come up with. Who knows I might even win something.
