First impression

First, there are some details on how this would work on Adium’s blog. Great read on the overall philosophy of the Twitter integration.

Not surprisingly, Adium tries to fit Twitter support into a chat metaphor. People you follow are automatically added to a new Twitter contact group, which is thanksfully collapsed by default! A new section called “Bookmarks” is also added (I’m actually not sure if that existed in previous versions of Adium and I just missed it) which contains a “Timeline (name of account)” bookmark for each Twitter account you set up. This actually didn’t work the first time I tried, which was quite disconcerting. According to Adium’s developpers, this is a bug that will be addressed with an upcoming second beta. At this point, restarting Adium should do the trick.

Timelines are actually group chats in which people you follow are participants of sorts. This is the core of Adium’s support for Twitter. Any time someone you follow posts a public tweet, it appears in the group chat window (modulo refresh period, of course). Noteworthy is the fact Adium lets you select a different appearance for group chat vs. regular, one-to-one chat, which is quite useful. An example of such a styled timeline can be seen below.

Direct messages are implemented as one-to-one chats as would be expected.

Limitations

The model of Twitter as group chat has limits though. First, there is no way, that I could find at least, to have persistent search results, i.e. an updated list of all the mentions of given terms. Just like timelines for your Twitter accounts are implemented as bookmarks in your contact list, I can envision persistent searches being implemented as a different kind of timeline.

Another issue is the fact that it’s not as easy to follow conversations as it is with dedicated clients. I assume the appearance extra that you use could help but, just as Adium adds links to the right of each post to operate on them (re-tweet, reply, favorite, permalink or, in the case of one of your posts, delete), a link to open a conversation in a separate window (similar to what Tweetie for Mac does) would be helpful. Obviously, it could become confusing with direct message conversations, since that’s how they are implemented as well…

The biggest issue at this point, though, is the fact that you only get tweets that were published while you are connected. It seems, because I just discovered this as I was writing and haven’t had time to explore more, that historical tweets that occurred while you were not connected are accessible from the so-called chat transcripts where it’s difficult to quickly see which tweets you’ve read and which you haven’t. Similarly, your timeline is reset each time you restart Adium, making it difficult to follow things as some tweets will be in your current timeline while others are hidden in logs…

Conclusion, for now at least?

Adium’s implementation of Twitter support is based around the group chat metaphor. It has potential but also some serious drawbacks at this time, ones that will make me go back to a dedicated Twitter client, at least for now. Of course, the software is still in beta and might still evolve, though I don’t know that it’s not already feature-frozen. A pretty cool feature, though one not directly related to Twitter support, is support for laconi.ca servers, as well as IRC support. What this means is that I could potentially use Adium for most of my communication needs (IM, Twitter and IRC) and that’s a big plus for me. IRC support is good enough that I can use Adium instead of Colloquy for my very simple IRC needs. All that’s missing to make Adium my one-stop communication hub is better Twitter support and Skype support (there’s an Adium extra to support Skype but I haven’t managed to make it work)… I suspect this is a big upside for lots of people and a big advantage over other desktop clients. I will therefore follow with interest how Twitter support in Adium evolves and might report back from time to time…

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You cannot underestimate the importance of a good interface to a service. When I started using Twitter, the only interface I knew of was the web version, which was failing quite a bit (state represented by the now infamous fail whale). Installing and subsequently using Twitterrific really helped me get into Twitter. I present here a short review of Twitterrific, what I like about it and what I look for in a Twitter desktop client.

Main window

Twitterrific is an application which only interface element is, when inactive, a menu bar icon (), which allows to toggle visibility of the main application window and changes color when unread tweets are available. The application doesn’t even have a dock icon, which means that it won’t show up when you -tab between applications or doesn’t have a menu. Most, if not all, operations can be accessed via a keyboard shortcut. Of course, you can also interact with it via the mouse when the main window is shown, though as it doesn’t have menu bar, it takes some getting use to. A very useful feature is that it can react to a system-wide shortcut to display or hide the main window, which makes it easy to ready a new tweet or post something quickly.

The main window itself has a pretty simple layout though it can be a little alien at first as it is quite different from traditional OS X application windows. The timeline of received and sent tweets occupies most of the space. A simple control bar rests at the bottom, allowing you to access your Twitter home page, change Twitterrific settings (implemented as a modal sheet), refresh posts and post a new status. As you can see, it’s mostly targeted at reading as opposed to posting.

Posts are presented in reverse chronological order (most recent at the top), each displayed with its author’s avatar. Twitterrific remembers the last post you read and dim the ones you’ve seen already. Mentions are tinted so that you can distinguish them from regular posts. Same goes for direct messages. Note that there is no distinction made between replies and mentions, meaning that posts are tinted the same way regardless of whether they are direct replies or re-tweets. As long as your user name appears in it, a tweet will be tinted.

Interacting with a post

Selecting a tweet brings up three new icons, allowing further interaction. The first one is the gear menu, which provides lots of options, as shown on the screenshot to the left. A little surprising is the fact that this looks like a contextual menu, yet provides actions that are actually affecting the whole application. The second icon provides a quick way to reply to the selected tweet, while the third one sends you directly to the author’s web site, as defined in their profile.

Neat features

Twitterrific offers Growl support, the notification framework of choice on OS X. This goes very well with the overall application philosophy of staying out of your way, hidden until needed. You receive notifications when new tweets are available but you get informed in an non-intrusive way, allowing you to see them from the corner of your eye, while you keep doing whatever else you’re doing. To me, this was also a big plus to adopt Twitter, as it put me in control, kept in touch with the flux of things without having to check the details until I was ready to.

Last but not least, I find Twitterrific quite appealing to the eyes, despite the non-standard interface and it’s also very frugal resource-wise (both in terms of CPU time and RAM usage), which can be quite important when you have a bunch of applications running at the same time, all competing for your computer’s attention!

Limitations

To me, Twitterrific is terrific application for a Twitter beginner, and without which I probably wouldn’t have taken to Twitter as much as I have (or it might have taken me more time to do so). It’s also very well suited to what I would say is the majority of Twitter users (though it’s a wild guess on my part), i.e. people who mostly follow a limited number (think dozens, not hundreds) of people and post infrequently from a single account.

However, as I became more and more comfortable with Twitter, I found that Twitterrific, at least in its free instantiation, was missing some features that I grew quite fond of using my Twitter client of choice on the iPhone, Tweetie. I actually consider Tweetie for iPhone as the best client out there, all platforms considered, but that’s a story for some other time…

For one thing, Twitterrific (in its ad-supported version) doesn’t support multiple accounts, nor does it offer persistent search capability or ability to follow trends, all of which I became more and more dependent on to more efficiently use Twitter. I now commonly use 3 different accounts for different purposes and being able to use a single interface without jumping through hoops to post and read tweets from several accounts is a big plus.

Similarly, I rely on persistent search results to follow mentions of things that I am interested in (most often JBoss Portal), while I use trends an easy, real-time news engine (though one that’s obviously biased towards a wealthy, industrialized and rather frivolous society that can afford almost constant connectivity, but here also, this is a subject for a different time)… I also like/miss on the desktop the nearby functionality offered by most iPhone clients, which allow to filter tweets based on your location, which is an interesting way to see what’s going on locally and potentially find interesting new people to follow.

Moving forward

In essence, I have been searching for an OS X Twitter client that would replicate the functionnality offered by Tweetie on the iPhone. I don’t consider myself a Twitter power user but my usage pattern has moved beyond what Twitterrific comfortably handles. This is not a dig on Twitterrific. Like I said, it’s a terrific app that I would recommend in a heartbeat. I just outgrew the use for which it is optimized.

Requirements

What I want essentially from a (desktop) Twitter client is:

• multi-user account support
• ability to track trends
• ability to track search results
• Growl support
• streamlined interface (though what that means exactly is open to interpretation)
• ability to track where I stopped reading tweets
• native interface with low resource usage, i.e. not Air-based which I find quite the resource hog at this point
• free and opensource if possible (though I am not opposed to buying a client that I’d like, I bought Tweetie on the iPhone after all)

With these in mind, I’ve been / will be looking at several twitter clients to see which one sticks around. Probably more to come on this…

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Sunny Sunday Mill Valley Groove Day from the album Honeycomb by Frank Black

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There are lots of annoying things in C++. At least, things that annoy me. I’m sure there are good reasons for things to be that way but to me some of the stuff is just downright ugly. Take the STL for example. How complicated does this needs to be? For one thing, it’s really not OO. Then looking at the documentation can be pretty intense unless you know your templates (which according to Wikipedia, allow the programmer to save time and space in source code by simplifying code through overloading functions with an arbitrary type parameter), inside and out. So, how simple does it really make your life? Turns out, it’s pretty neat once you figure how to use it. Figuring the stuff out is however rather painful.

The project I work on has three developers (including me), which for my group is pretty consequent. Only one of us really knows C++ (meaning he worked on real C++ projects before, while the other guy’s and my only exposure to the language was whatever we did with it in school). That developer worked on the most complicated part of our project (a graph structure, and related algorithm implementation, aimed at aligning multiple streams of words together) and first implemented a part of the structure using an STLmap. To finish the first iteration fast, we used strings as keys (to keep the code simple). These strings were generated from an int array (representing coordinates in the multi-dimensional alignment space). Obviously, this was far from optimal. We decided that switching to a (not quite standard but implemented in GCC and in Visual C++) hash_map would make things faster since we needed fast access to the the values given a key and that maps are not hashed associative arrays. However, making the switch proved to be more painful than what I was used to: in Java, it’s easy to switch between different implementations of associative collections (collectively referred to as Maps in Java). In C++: not so much! I am not sure what C++ experience our local “guru” has but what I know is that when we have a question (which, granted, probably have often obvious solutions to C++ experts), he usually has the answer. However, he couldn’t figure out how to easily switch our structure to use a hash_map instead of a map. Since it was optimization-related and others parts of the code required more attention, he moved on to working on some other things. I decided to take a shot at it today because I don’t like it when a language forces me to compromise on a design.

To keep this post from getting any longer, I’ll just say that I managed to make it work after some effort. How important was that refactoring? Considering that the version using hash_map is more than 18000 times (yes, you read correctly, 18000 times) faster than the previous version, I would say it’s pretty major, wouldn’t you? And it’s just sad that the complexity of C++ prevented us from making these changes sooner/faster. It says a lot about a language when a (moderately) experienced developer with that language has problems figuring out the standard collection framework. A programming language should help you implement the design you created and you shouldn’t have to compromise (too much) to make it work reasonably well… C++ is really static compared to Java and makes it difficult to experiment with different implementations. Case in point: the refactoring I did wouldn’t have taken more than a couple of minutes to implement in Java. A more proficient C++ coder than I am might not have spent as much time on it as we did but the fact remains that the STL (and C++) didn’t help…

World from the album Republic by New Order

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456 Berea Street

bad things from the album interstate 5 CD single by The Wedding Present

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How do you approach user interface design?

Lots and lots of iterations until something feels right. Avoiding features until the interface for them is apparent. Seeing how users use the existing features to do things I didn’t expect, and then making those things easier.

Joshua Schachter, answering a question from Rands in A Del.icio.us Interview

If it doesn’t feel right, the job is not done. Until your software feels natural, until interacting with the computer just flows, without having to think about it, tweak the interface. And when you think you’re done, watch your users: nothing is more rewarding for a software developer than seeing users make the software their own and use it beyond what was originally envisioned.

I’m Amazed from the album Pixies by The Pixies

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It goes without saying that I will re-install. However, without Quicksilver, I wouldn’t have been able to use my laptop in the mean time. It even allowed me to try and re-install from the full updater instead of Software Update (both from the GUI and command line since Installer would get stuck after showing the license). Though it didn’t work, at least, I could try! Thanks, Quicksilver!

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inessential.com

One of the benefits of using a desktop weblog editor is crash protection.

Say you’re writing a post in your browser, and your browser crashes. The post is gone.

Say you’re writing in MarsEdit instead. You can save as a draft periodically so you can prevent a crash from losing your post.

But—even more—MarsEdit automatically recovers your post in the event of a crash, even if you didn’t save it as a draft. When you re-launch MarsEdit it will re-open the post or posts you were working on.

I concur: MarsEdit has saved my posts a couple of times already. It’s not only a matter of MarsEdit crashing: if my mac crashes for some reason while I am working on a post (or have a post waiting to be posted in the background), MarsEdit saves the day. Brent has done a very good job with it.

Now the big question: why isn’t there more text-processing applications implementing auto-save?

Giving You Up from the album by Kylie Minogue

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Then, while looking at the Rails website, I noticed that references were made to Basecamp, which I had previously put in a corner of my mind a while ago as something to look at, being in a similar application segment than Mesquite. Basecamp was developed using Ruby on Rails. The plot was thickening…

Just recently, I got to meet Brian personally and he tried to convince Robert and I to use Rails to develop Mesquite…

Finally, TextMate, a much hyped text editor for OS X, was officially released today. Looking at their website, I noticed a block on the right column called TextMate in Action pointing to a video none other than the one that was pointed to by Brian! And I’m like: WTF? This was getting scary!

Decided to not let coincidences take the better of me, I investigated some more and found that TextMate, Basecamp and Ruby on Rails were all developed by the same guy. Whew! There was a rational reason (there’s a pleonasm for you) behind this madness…

Man, the persecution never ends: Dion Almaer chimes in! This setup movie has become something of a blockbuster!

You Don’t Know Jesus from the album Rock Action by Mogwai

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To solve this issue, I decided to improve how Stattraq was handling the article id and you can too! It’s fairly easy: open stattraq.php (it’s found in the wp-content/plugins directory of your WordPress root directory) in a text editor. Find the line that reads:

1. $article_id = 0; // default/mixed page – not just for one article

and replace it by the following:

1. //$article_id = 0; // default/mixed page – not just for one article
2. if (isset($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']) && !empty($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'])){
3. $article_id = $wpdb->get_var(“SELECT ID FROM $tableposts WHERE 1=1″.$where);
4. } else {
5. $article_id = 0;
6. }

The trick here is to use the url parsing magic found in wp-blog-header.php. That’s where the $where variable gets built. We then use it to retrieve the post id. The check on the server query is required because the index page needs to be processed differently. If the requested page is the index page, the query returns all the posts and get_var returns the id of the first record returned (which is your weblog’s first entry) which is not what we want.

Well, apparently this does not work though I am at a loss right now to figure out why. The code above, executed in the context of index.php, seems to return what I want. However, when executed in stattraq.php, it doesn’t work, resulting in the article_id field being empty… I guess I jumped the gun, thinking that I could use $where in Stattraq but it seems like it’s not going to happen without a fight. I’ll look at that when I get up.

Please note however that I haven’t fully tested this code so bad things might happen. Moreover, I’m both a WordPress and PHP newbie so chances are that my solution is neither elegant nor efficient. Also, smart readers will have noticed that this only addresses one side of the problem: the article id should now be correct in the Stattraq database. However, previous entries will still keep the “0″ article_id. How to fix this is left as an exercise to the reader.

Many thanks to Robert and Thomas for their help!

Obstacle 1 from the album Turn On the Bright Lights by Interpol

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