Category Archive for ‘Hahlo’

Hahlo 3.1 - Now with even better searching • 9

010608

Its been an exciting month since the release of Hahlo 3, my analytics show that usage has increased approximately 300% since launch (wow), Twitter has been up and down and now looks like it getting back in order after the troubles of a week or so ago, and Summize have added some fancy new features to their service and api…

More powerful search

The addition of the Summize.com powered search function in Hahlo 3 has been a huge hit. For those of you who also visited the Summize site, you probably had a play around with their “Advanced Search”. Now in Hahlo 3.1 you can also do these same “advanced” searches with ease, to try it out just tap the “Advanced” button, in the menu just below the standard search box.

“Near Me” and location based searches

In the time since Hahlo 3 was launched, Summize have also bee adding to their own API, one of the big updates was the inclusion location data for each tweet, and the ability to search based on those locations.

As part of the search related upgrades in Hahlo 3.1 you can now do the same sort of “near me” search that was popularised by the iPhone-jailbreak Twitter app ‘Twinkle’. I’ll admit I wasn’t a fan of the feature in Twinkle, mainly because it thought I was in Cyprus. I am not in Cyprus. Not even close.

You might be wondering how Hahlo knows where you are, well its all based on what you have your “location” set to in Twitter. Hahlo uses this value in combination with the Google Maps API to determine the coordinates for your location to be used for searching. The more specific you make your location the better the search results will be. For example, I’m in Newcastle Australia, but if I just put Newcastle, Google doesn’t recognise the correct one.

Twitter also added an API function to allow you to update your ‘location’ field from API apps such as Hahlo, and now on the “settings” screen you can easily update your locastion whenever you like, and your coordinates etc will also be recalculated. You can also check on the settings screen to see what the Google Maps API interpreted your location as, just to make sure its accurate.

Once you’ve followed the onscreen prompts to set your location info up, then you’re ready to start using “Near Me”, just tap the “Near Me” button in menu, just below the search box. Its also accessible from the tabs that have been added to the search and advanced search pages.

Behind the scenes

In the last month I’ve also refined a lot of Hahlo’s code to make it easier for me to maintain. I’ve also tried to catch specific errors when they occur and return you a simple explanation. If you ever have any trouble or see a weird error then please let me know, I can’t fix things I don’t know about. You can do so here: http://help.hahlo.com

Style and Layout

No big changes in this respect, just tidied some screens up that weren’t quite polished for the 3.0 release, and maked sure basic behaviours are consistent across most screens. One tiny change you might notice is the “results for: search item” boxes on the search pages have been updated, nothing to drastic but they now have colours based on the colourful Summize logo.

Bugs Bugs Bugs. And some feature requests

Version 3.1 also includes fixes for several bugs that have been reported over the past month (there were numerous requests that I couldn’t fit in due the final rush to get 3.1 out, sorry in advance). The most significant is that the character counter should now be correct whether you are using Hahlo on your desktop computer or on an iPhone. If you still have trouble with it, let me know. http://help.hahlo.com

Other things of notice that have been fixed (hopefully) include: the behaviour of the ‘favourite’ star when fav-ing and then unfav-ing a tweet, the addition of refresh buttons to search result pages, the addition of a ‘refresh’ button to the bottom of the public timeline, a search box has been added to the top of the search results so that you can search again without having to open the menu.

You’ll also notice a number appear just below the “tweet” button in the top right. This will (once the Twitter api method is fixed up - thanks @al3x) display how many authenticated API requests you have remaining in the hour. Twitter usually limits users to 70 requests per hour, but recently due to their load and stability issues they’ve dropped this back to 30 to help load. This counter will update when you make a request so that you always have a rough idea of how many requests you’ve got left. I can’t guarantee its accuracy, so don’t take it as gospel, its just their to hopefully reduce the “shock” when that first “Bad request - limit exceeded” error pops up…

One more thing

You might have seen a tweet recently where I mentioned the new “Help Center” that I’ve set up. You can access it at http://help.hahlo.com and its your one-stop-shop for all your questions, comments, bug reports, feature requests etc. Help.hahlo is powered by the great new “Help Center” from Get Satisfaction. If you prefer you can also go to http://getsatisfaction.com/hahlo to get all the same info, plus a little bit more that the “Help Center” doesn’t yet cater for.

There are probably other small changes I could talk about, but I think that’s enough. Now, go and play with Hahlo 3.1 and let me know what you think.

Filed under: Hahlo 9 Comments

Hahlo 3 goes live! • 5

040508

Hahlo 3 Goes Live

The latest and greatest Hahlo has just been released live to the world, the original Twitter client for iPhone just got even better. Hahlo 3 has been in development for the past month, and in active beta testing for the past two and bit weeks. The beta itself has proved popular among users, with over 1,000 people signing up to take part. Not bad when compare to just the 120-odd that tested the Hahlo 2 Beta last year. Several sites have run reviews of the Hahlo 3 Beta, including a nice detailed preview by The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

Twitter + Summize = Hahlo 3

Go to Hahlo.com now!

Feature highlights

These are just some of the new and improved features in Hahlo 3. For further information please visit the Hahlo project page where you’ll find detailed feature info, support and more. [http://deanjrobinson.com/projects/hahlo/]

  • Restyled interface, introducing all-new ‘stack’ style menu, and tabbed navigation on some screens.
  • Built-in search capabilities made possible by the API provided by Summize.com
  • Customisable ‘home’ page
  • Avatar and text size settings
  • Inline replies and direct messages
  • User profiles - just like the sidebar in twitter
  • Improved auto-refresh for the friends timeline
  • Refresh buttons on almost all timelines
  • Added ability to add new friends, as well as follow/unfollow functions and ability to turn notifications on/off
  • Hashtags are auto-linked in timelines
  • New popup sub-menus when you tap on a users name or avatar
  • Countless bug fixes and enhancements to make the overall Hahlo experience even better

Hahlo 3 has only be in the wild, but its already getting some great feedback, which you can checkout here: http://summize.com/search?q=hahlo… or of course you could use the search box in the hahlo menu to fin the same info.

A huge thanks to all those beta testers who made suggestions, found bugs and gave it a thorough work out over the past couple of weeks. Its much appreciated.

An even bigger thank you to those of you who have already donated towards Hahlo, its always nice to know there are people out there who appreciate the time and effort I put into building and supporting Hahlo. If you’d like to donate you can do so via PayPal, you’ll even get a public thank you :) [Donation Page]

Filed under: Hahlo 5 Comments

Hahlo 3 Beta Testing • 2

180408

A couple of days ago I asked for some beta testers for Hahlo Version 3 via Twitter, if you haven’t already, and you would like to try out the latest “bleeding” version of “Hahlo 3 - Legendary Edition” then drop me a line at beta@hahlo.com and I’ll provide you with more details. It’s definitely worth a look.

While you’re at it, have a read of John Gruber’s thoughts about the current crop of Twitter webapps…and finally someone who agrees with me about Thincloud’s abuse of the Twitter logo.

New Leaders seem to have recently renamed Thincloud to the rather scammy-sounding “Twitter for iPhone”. They use Twitter’s logo and name in such a way that, unless you read the light-gray small print in the footer on their web site — which small print is not displayed when viewing the web site on an actual iPhone — creates the impression that you’re looking at some sort of official Twitter iPhone interface. - daringfireball.net

Yeah…What he said.

Filed under: Hahlo 2 Comments

Hahlo 2 - the original just got better • 13

220907


Hahlo 2.0

Version 2 of Hahlo is now live! It has been in the works almost since the day that version 1 was released. The short timeframe that version 1 had ended up probably doing more harm than good, and while the basics worked well enough it had a few failings which unfortunately resulted in many people switching to other alternatives. Now with Hahlo 2.0 a lot more thought has gone into how things should work, and how they should fit together. On top of that there are also a huge pile of new features and enhancements which will hopefully bring those that had left back to Hahlo. Keep reading for full details about the additions and improvements that have been made in this all-new version.

The Interface

The basics of the interface should still be familiar to users of v1 despite that fact that pretty much everything has changed in some way. Lets start with the navigation. Gone is the unintuitive ‘star’ button which was used for updates, in its place is a nice, simple “Update” button. Give that a tap and up pops the familiar update box, the same as before.

Hahlo Toolbar

One of the biggest changes is the relocation of the menu/toolbar form the bottom of the screen to the top, and by default its hidden to keep screen real estate free. This was also done out of necessity since the mobile version of Safari doesn’t support fixed positioning. Tap the ‘Menu’ button and the toolbar will appear, and you’ll see a whole bunch of brightly coloured icons to navigate your way around. You’ll also see the arrow, tap that to reveal more toolbar options. They have been split like this to make the buttons themselves larger and easier to use on the iPhone.

Hahlo Toolbar

On a number of the ‘timelines’ you will see a few little circular icons in the top right of each tweet. The star icon allows you to quickly, and easily save the tweet as a favourite. Just tap it and it will turn ‘gold’ once it has been saved. The message bubble with the ‘M’ in it is for Direct Messaging that particular user, give it a tap and the direct message box will appear with the recipients name already filled in. The third button is the highly requested reply button, tap that and the update box will appear with the @username already filled in and ready for your reply.

Hahlo Tweets

From any screen you can easily tap on a users profile picture and you will be taken to that users individual timeline. Coming soon you will also be able to follow and unfollow other twitterers directly from Hahlo.

What can I do with Hahlo?

First thing that you will probably notice when you log in to Hahlo is that there are a lot more options. You can now do just about everything that is available from the twitter website all from Hahlo, and there are still more features in the wings. Lets have a look at what you can do.

  • “My Timeline” - this is your timeline of tweets
  • “My Friends Timeline” - this displays the most recent 20 tweets from you and your friends, at the bottom there is a button to show 20 more tweets, tap it and the next 20 load directly onto the bottom of list. You can view upto the last 200 tweets in your friends timeline.
  • “Friends I’m Following” - a list of all the friends who updates you are following, with easy links to DM or reply to any of them. There is also a ‘grid view’ button in the top right that will take you to a screen displaying all your friends avatars, just tap their picture and you’ll be taken to their timeline.
  • “Who is Following me” - a list, 20 at a time, of the people who are following your updates, along with links to send a reply and view their timelines. Again there is the ‘grid view’ option.
  • “Replies to my Tweets” - simply view a list of all the @ replies that have been sent to you
  • “Direct Messages” - this is a list of all the direct messages that you have received. At the top you’ll notice three buttons, the ‘outbox’ button will take you to a list of all the messages that you have sent, and the last button will open the ‘send message’ box for you to direct message one of your friends.
  • “My Favourite Tweets” - a list of all the tweets that you have marked as favourites, great for saving funny, informative, or useful tweets.
  • “Public Timeline” - pretty self-explanatory, its the public twitter timeline

As already mentioned you can easily update your twitter status by tapping the ‘update’ button at the top of the screen no matter where in Hahlo you are. Replying to tweets has never been easier, just use the @ button that appears on many of the screens. The same goes for sending a direct message, just tap the ‘M’ button as mentioned above.

Optimised for your convenience

Since I wrote an article recently comparing the relative load sizes of some of Hahlo’s competitors its only fair that I try my best to optimise Hahlo to the best of my ability. All images have been optimised to provide minimal file sizes, my css is now gzipped which reduces the load size greatly, and the javascript is now packed and gzipped further reducing load.
With regards to the CSS there is still more room for further optimisation in the future.

When you first login to Hahlo the inital page load is just 60kb, almost half that of v1, and a full load of the public timeline is just 100kb, but approx. 40% of this is user profile image which are beyond my control.

Its also worth noting that now that the full interface is AJAX many things such as icons and the UI images only ever need to be loaded once, after that pretty much all that you are loading is the content of the page in questions, this helps to reduce load times across the board.

Ask and you shall receive

In the past couple of months I have had many requests from users, and I have tried where possible to include their requests. Two of the most requested features were @ replies and clickable links. As already mentioned sending an @ reply is dead easy, and you will now notice that whenever an @username appears in a tweet it is linked directly to that users timeline. You will also notice that any link that is in a tweet will be linked up automatically, something that was request by numerous users.

Hahlo Replies

When I opened the beta version of 2.0 up for testing the first request I got was for an easy way to bookmark the friends timeline. Within about 20 minutes I had that sorted, along with a bunch of other ‘pretty’ links that you can use.

The Future

Yes there are still more features that I hope to add to Hahlo in the future. The first on that list will be adding the functionality to allow you to follow and unfollow fellow twitterers quickly and easily. If you have a request for something that you would like to see Hahlo do, I’d love to hear it, just leave a comment or contact me at dean@hahlo.com.

Filed under: Hahlo 13 Comments

Hahlo.com is Live to the world • 1

300607

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.

Filed under: Hahlo 1 Comment

Hahlo.com beta opens soon • 1

230607

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:

  • public timeline
  • friends timeline
  • user timeline
  • view replies (requires logon)
  • view direct messages (requires logon)

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.

Filed under: Hahlo 1 Comment

Twitter for iPhone • 12

130607

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.

Filed under: Hahlo 12 Comments
Socialized through Gregarious 42