TweetImag.es I still find it hard to believe that there is sill no easy, official way of retrieving a twitter user’s avatar, luckily there are a few people out there building simple services to fill the gap. I just found tweetimag.es via a tweet from @laterstars, and it looks like it should meet my needs for now. I’ve also updated the ‘Twitter Avatars in BuddyPress’ function I posted to use this service, as the previous service seem to have some stability issues.
Link Archive
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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.
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Ten things that annoy Jeff Croft about twitter He makes some very good points. I tend to agree with his comment in relation to @mentions, but I would rather that we still had an option as to whether or not we wanted to see them. I personally do want to see other peoples @mentions - its how I used to find interesting people (and how I found @jeffcroft in the first place).
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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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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
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Webkit Web Inspector Updates These look like great changes, will have to download the latest nightly and try them out. The current Web Inspector is cool, but I still always go back to Firebug, its not that I don’t like Web Inspector I just prefer Firebug.
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Fluency Admin 2.1.1 update available now After 2.1 hit 5,000 downloadsin less than a month I decided I’d knock out a quick update. Its not a huge update, but it does fix a few plugin display issues for the following plugins: Acronyms, NextGen Gallery, One-Click Plugin Updater, HeadSpace2 and WP-Polls. Fixes broken styling of Media Library popup and also added an option to set custom logo to display at the top of the menu (replaces WordPress logo). Download it here. Find out more here.
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Pink for October 2009 As I have done for the past couple of years, this site is turning pink for October. Why?
The Pink for October campaign is about blog and website owners showing their support for breast cancer awareness by turning our sites pink for the month of October.
To participate simply sign up at pinkforoctober.org and then transform your blog or twitter page with a nice shade of pink. In a change from the bright/hot pink I’ve used in the past I’ve instead gone for the soft pastel pink used on the Pink for October site, its a little easier on my eyes.
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Download Hundreds of @font-face Fonts If, like me, you’re considering adding a bit of @font-face spice to your site then I’d definitely recommend having a look at Font Squirrel. There is a stack of fonts, with new ones be frequently added, ready to be used. There should be a style to suit your needs in there somewhere.
