Tag Archive for ‘Hahlo’

Hahlo 3.1 - Now with even better searching 10

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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.

» Continue reading Hahlo 3.1 - Now with even better searching

Hahlo 3 goes live! 6

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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.

Go to Hahlo.com now!

» Continue reading Hahlo 3 goes live!

TUAW reviews Hahlo 3 Beta 0

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Mike Schramm over at TUAW has put together a great review of the Hahlo 3 Beta. http://www.tuaw.com/2008/04/25/tuaw-previews-hahlo-3-the-legendary-edition/

Hahlo 3 Beta Testing 2

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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.

Gazing into my crystal ball 21

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Ok, so there hasn’t been as much activity on here in recent months as I would like, but finding time to do all the things I want (and need) to do is the problem. With a bit of luck I will be able to recapture some time to work on projects in the next month or so. I am now inside my final month of University (finally), with a handful of fairly large assignments to complete, but no end of year exams to worry about. However also over the next month I also need to find somewhere to live which will no doubt consume a fair amount of time. But then, hopefully, I should be able to get back to work on my side projects. Lets have a quick look at those projects.

Redoable

I have received so many requests for me to update Redoable, initially for Wordpress 2.2 (which only introduced a couple of small issues) and more recently for Wordpress 2.3 compatibility. This one is a bigger issue since the way that categories are handled has changed completely. Then there are all the little bits and pieces that were never really “just right”, most probably due to Redoable being my first Wordpress theme, or in this case theme modification (Redoable is based on the code of K2). Mind you these ‘issues’ haven’t stopped over 30,000 downloads.but with the last update way back in April it really is time for some progress to be made.

So where do I begin. Well, it just so happens that Michael Heilemann and co are into the ‘release candidate’ stages of K2 1.0. K2 has become even greater over the last 10 months, and it is already Wordpress 2.3 compatible. Tyler Longren (creator of Unwakeable, another K2-based theme) recently announced that he planned on basing the next version of Unwakeable on K2 1.0 when it was released. A couple of months ago I had planned to do Redoable 1.3 and fix some of the main issues that had come up since the release of 1.2, but I simply couldn’t find the time that I wanted to spend on it. I can now say that there will be no Redoable 1.3.

Nope, I will be jumping straight to Redoable 2.0. Again I’ll be using K2 as the base, and although I have started some initially work, the main body of work on 2.0 won’t begin until the final stable release of K2 1.0 is available. While its not going to be exactly the same as 1.x, it will keep a lot of the ‘flavour’ of it since that seems to be what people want. I’m still thinking through about which additional plugin support, and other features I’ll add to the K2 base, but hopefully before Christmas there will be a new version of Redoable for you all the play with.

Wordpress Plugins

I am well aware that just about all of my plugins need to be updated to work with the latest Wordpress 2.3. In particular Ultimate Category Cloud, which no longer works due to the previously mentioned category changes in WP2.3. Other plugins just need a tidy up, and general bug fixing. I will hopefully get at least some of the plugins updated to go along with the release of Redoable 2.0

More Wordpress themes

I didn’t take long for people to start requesting a download of the ‘Pipedream’ theme that I am currently using. The thing is that Pipedream was designed for my site and my site only, its not really ready for a public release (yet). It doesn’t really work like a normal theme, due to the number of customisations that are built in. Beside the idea was that I wanted my site to be unique, which I had lost while I was still using Redoable. However I have begun thinking about a ‘Public’ version of Pipedream, but as far as a release date it probably won’t be until the new year.

A couple of weeks ago, I was sick of doing uni work one night and just started playing around with a magazine style layout which has kind of progressed into the beginnings of another new Wordpress theme. Unlike Redoable and Pipedream this new theme is going to be much lighter and brighter, with a slightly different approach to the way that posts are arranged and displayed. More about this new theme in the coming months.

Hahlo

Although I’ve only just rolled out the new version of Hahlo I’ve still got a list of things “to-do” which just didn’t make it into 2.0. Most of them are minor behind the scenes things, but there are also several things that have been requested by users. Things such as an quicker way to refresh the current timeline, currently it takes two ‘taps’, one would be ideal. Another thing I would like to try and get working is some form of user options to allow people to customise their Hahlo experience. For example some people would like to login and be taken straight to their friends timeline, other would like to be taken to their favourites list, I would love to be able to implement this.

I also have plans to release a very simple Hahlo desktop application, still using the webapp but in a standalone webkit-based application. I had considered turning Hahlo into an Adobe AIR application, they seem to be all the rage at the moment, but since just about everything in Hahlo relies pretty heavily on php and the functions within, and AIR doesn’t support php that pretty much canned that idea. In the meantime if you really want a Twitter app running on AIR, I suggest trying out Snitter.

Others…

And on top of all that I’ve got a couple of other things that I’m working on, one of which I’m working on at the moment as part of a University assignment. Plus no doubt I’ll run off on a tangent and end up working on things that aren’t on the list above as well.

Hahlo 2 - the original just got better 13

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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.

Is a native app necessary? 0

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Maybe I’m biased (very likely) but I don’t necessarily see the point of a native Twitter app for the iPhone. As cool as it may be, I don’t really see the point when you will still need to access the web to use it anyway, so really isn’t a web app sufficient? On a completely related, and biased, topic the Hahlo 2.0 beta is now open. http://beta.hahlo.com

iPhone development and blog neglect 1

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Its always the same. I almost always find that I try and do too many things at once. As a result some things get neglected.

Hahlo

The last time I posted anything here was when I launched Hahlo, and that was almost three weeks ago. Since then I’ve spent a lot of time chasing bugs, and trying to improve it. You have no idea how much I wish I could get my hands on an iPhone, beause trying o develop for a device that you can’t get near is very difficult.

Who knows exactly when they will release the iPhone in Australia, but I don’t see it arriving until mid next year. I’m kind of hoping that we might benefit from the delay by getting an updated version. Even better would be if they release new iPods with similiar functionality (obviously without the phone bit).

Following the launch of Hahlo, I asked for (useful) feedback. I got a little bit, but for the most part it wasn’t too useful. I also did some searching (yes I googled my own app) and found plenty of ‘interesting’ comments. One person who shall remain nameless made a less than complimentary comment about Hahlo and its design… I’ll keep what I think about one of their iPhone app designs to myself…

Due to the rushed nature of Hahlo’s development there were some areas where I kind of coded myself into a corner, with no way out other than to start again. To a certain extent thats what I’ve started to do. Using the super nifty iUI library developed by Joe Hewitt I’ve started work on what will be Hahlo 2.0. A simple thing like switching to processing the JSON feed server-side has allowed me to easily add a couple of the things I had originally wanted in my original version, such as parsing url’s in tweets so they become clickable links. you can have a look at the new bea here: http://beta.hahlo.com/iui

Other iPhone related stuffs

I couldn’t stop at just one iPhone ‘app’, so I started work on another. This time I thought of something that would be truly useful on the iPhone, a mobile interface for Lighthouse App. If you’re looking for a simple online bug tracking app then Lighthouse is really worth a look. I haven’t made a huge amount of progress on it as yet, but I will eventually find some time to spend on it.

A couple of days ago Steven Frank (from Panic) released a super simple wiki designed specifically with the iPhone in mind. W2 has the basics, you can create and edit your wiki pages, you can even use markdown for formatting. Theres no login management at the moment, so everyone will have access. but if thats a problem you could always just use htaccess to restrict it.

I spent a couple of hours last night mashing together the W2 wiki with the iUI library to make a wiki that looked like the rest of the iPhone interface. Theres a few buggy bits but overall it works ok. I had to play around with the W2 source code a little, but nothing too complex. You can have a play with my work-in-progress version here: http://beta.hahlo.com/wiki/

Keep in mind that the wiki is designed to work best on the iPhone (although I can’t test that…) or Safari. However… it looks completely different in Safari 3 to what it looks like in the latest Webkit build. Check this out. I’ll have to look into why exactly that is.

Blog neglect

I’m still working on my redesign, its along time coming, but like everything else I will eventually get it finished. I’ve got all the major parts done (I think) but its all the fine tuning that takes time, and I want to get it just right before I make it live.

Also in the works is my entry for the sandbox design comp. Again the major bits are done, I just need to sit down and finish it off. Entries close in a little under two weeks time, so I guess I should get onto that pretty soon.

Well, thats probably the longest blog entry I’ve written in a while. And its probably a good indication that I should post more often.

Hahlo.com is Live to the world 1

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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.

Hahlo.com beta opens soon 1

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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.

Socialized through Gregarious 42
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