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Yesterday I launched Hahlo 4.1 and one of the changes was the switch from to old-style ‘RT’ retweets over to the new twitter retweet api. Unfortunately this seems to have upset a few people, not necessarily because I’ve added support for the new api but because I chose not to maintain the old-style RTs as well. This is a tale of why.
Yesterday I launched Hahlo 4.1 and one of the changes was the switch from to old-style ‘RT’ retweets over to the new twitter retweet api. Unfortunately this seems to have upset a few people, not necessarily because I’ve added support for the new api but because I chose not to maintain the old-style RTs as well. This is a tale of why.
Keep in mind this falls into the category of “people can use twitter however the hell they want”, you’re allowed to disagree, just don’t be a knob about it.
The Hahlo side of the things
Hahlo is about moving forward, not backwards, if I were not interested in keeping up with the new feature additions to twitter (and the api) then Hahlo probably wouldn’t still be in active development. Also maintaining two different methods for retweeting means more work on my side making sure they both continue working, having an ‘RT’ button which performs different functions for different people is not only illogical, but would very quickly become a pain to support. Also, please remember I don’t get paid anything to work on or support Hahlo, I do that because I’m a nice guy.
The twitter side of things
Those who’ve used Hahlo will see that I’ve tried to match the same ‘flow’ as on twitter.com. For example, you click ‘retweet’ and you’re asked to confirm that you’d like to retweet this tweet to your followers. Not everyone likes the new-style retweets, but then not everyone like change. But changes happens, deal with it.
Evan Williams wrote a great post on why retweets work the way that they work on twitter.com, if you haven’t read it I strongly suggest you do.
The “retweets annoy me” side of things
There is a reason I never added retweets to Hahlo prior to version 4, I don’t (or didn’t to be more precise) like them. And then when I did add them, I also added an ‘hide all retweets’ option. This is why, and if you disagree (likely) I’d like to hear (constructively) why that is. Lets try a common example to illustrate my point.
» Continue reading “To retweet or not to retweet”
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Hahlo 4.1 is here, and its *totally awesome* Hit the link to read the full post on the Hahlo blog detailing the new and improved features in 4.1including lists, retweets and geolocation amongst other things.
Sidenote
WordPress 2.9 compatibility, fixes a few minor style bugs, adds options for custom menu width, menu positioning (fixed or absolute) and show/hide menu icons. More info here or download from the WordPress plugin directory here.
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PastryKit I spotted the pastrykit.js inside Apple’s mobile help pages ages ago, and at the time I hoped that I might be able to reverse engineer bits of it to work out how the hell it was working…I had no luck at all. It would be nice if Apple would released this to developers but I’m doubtful. I stand by my theory that Apple won’t open up these sort of things (also file/camera access etc) to web developers because they want people to build native apps, not webapps.
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Is it just me, or is everything even more awesome when drawn as Lego minifigs?
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5422093/dc-comics-heroes-and-villains-drawn-as-minifigs
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How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell Sad thing is that this is all so true. From personal experience its all usually the direct result of a client and/or marketing department who thinks they know ‘web’ more than the people that they’ve employed to do ‘web’. Pretty sure I’ve experienced every step of this ‘hell’ process in the last six months (or less).
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iPhone Web Apps as an Alternative to the App Store Woot, mentioned by name in a daring fireball article, very nice indeed. Gruber makes some good points about why web apps can’t really compete with native apps, and I agree with most of his points, except maybe this one:
Not only are native iPhone apps faster and more capable than their web-app equivalents, but they’re easier to write.
Faster? Yes. More apable? Yes. Easier to write? Unless you know objective-c/cocoa/etc no, not really. if it was that ‘easy’ Hahlo would have stopped being a webapp long ago.
Also on the speed issue, yes the interfaces on a native app are going to be smoother and faster to use than webapps, but in the case of something like a twitter app a lot of that ‘speed’ has to do with the retrieving of the data from the twitter api. There is only one api and both webapps and native apps use it, they both request the same data, from the same source, over the same connection. They have to download the same avatars (poorly resized avatars don’t help download speeds…) etc. this isn’t where the speed issue lies. For example once you’re using Hahlo and all the main UI resources have loaded, your not really requesting much more data than a native app when you view a new timeline, profile, search results etc.
Also, how many native iPhone apps can also be used on Android devices and other devices such as the Nokia N900? Just saying ;p
