Monthly Archives: October 2012

Making Twitter post to App.Net

Development

AHHHHHH!Steve Streza: “Today I shipped the first alpha of Apparchy, which turns Twitter’s official iOS apps into App.net clients. You sign up for a free account on apparchy.net, add your app.net account, and then log into the Twitter app with your Apparchy username and password. Then, the Twitter app will start loading data from app.net through the Apparchy API.”

This is a nifty trick. A very appropriate hack for a hackathon. Steve has made Twitter’s own client post to App.net. It’s not as difficult as one might think because of a legacy feature remaining in the official Twitter for iOS, and I believe Twitter for Mac, clients.

It’s interesting to note that Twitter has allowed Twitter for Mac to die. If this works with the Mac client it just breathed new life into an otherwise dead piece of software. Well done.

The big question is, when will Twitter shut this down? One week, two? It won’t take long before we see a new drop of Twitter for iOS in the App Store with this feature removed.

It’ll be interesting to see if they ship another release of Twitter for Mac just to turn this off.

Until then, enjoy!

P.S. – Does this mean Twitter’s official client is breaking the Display Requirements?

The Pain of Change

Apple Core Labs, ,

Apple Core Labs LogoA few weeks back I decided it was time to update the Apple Core Labs website. Since I’m now making my living doing Freelance Development I figured it would make sense to have a portfolio look. This would allow me to show, and talk about, some of the applications I’ve contributed to.

Finding a Theme

Since I’m a fan of WordPress it made sense to find a provider of professional quality WordPress themes and buy one. I’m not a web layout professional and my HTML and CSS knowledge is minimal. In the past I would’ve tweaked and poked at the page until I was happy enough with the outcome and leave it at that. Witness the current Apple Core Labs page. It’s minimal at best, which isn’t a bad thing, but now I’d like a bit more.

During my search I considered quite a few Professional WordPress Theme shops but decided I’d go with The Theme Foundry. Why? I love their style. Their themes have an ascetic that’s pleasing to my eye and they’re very functional and professional looking.

In the end I chose the React theme. When I viewed the live demo I knew it was the them for me.

Updating

Now comes the hard part. I have to set aside time to install WordPress as my main site on Apple Core Labs and make sure I maintain all the static pages that are important to me, like RxCalc. That’s where it gets tricky, I think.

Creating pages that display on the home page will be the easy part. The Theme Foundry did a great job making that a no brainer. The thing I’m having trouble with is how do I feature a link to a random static HTML page on the home page without tweaking the template and messing up their fantastic scheme? The page I’m talking about is the beautiful RxCalc page, designed by my friends at Hundred10 Design. It’s a masterpiece and I’d like to keep it, but I’d like to give it a space on the home page, which means doing something special to the WordPress theme. At least I think that’s what I have to do?

What about my weblog?

The Apple Core Labs Weblog is WordPress based, but lives on a sub-domain. It’s easy enough to adapt that to use React. Thank goodness. At least that’s an easy change.

End of Line

Overall I’m really excite about the new look for the site and The Theme Foundry is a real class act. They’ve already been a great help. If you’re looking for a professionally built WordPress Theme I strongly recommend you visit The Theme Foundry.

If there are any React theme, or WordPress, experts out there and you read this, could you lend a fella some advice? How do I feature my static RxCalc page on the main React landing page? Is it possible without changing the template? If you have a suggestion leave a comment or send an email to rob.fahrni@gmail.com. Thank you.

On Tweetbot for Mac

#twitter, Indie, Mac,

I'm a Robot Bird, not a chicken.The Next Web: He says that Tapbots will continue to support the app, even after it cannot sell any more copies to new users, but that has forced them to charge more for the app, which runs $19.99 on the Mac App Store. “We know some will not be happy about Tweetbot for Mac’s pricing,” says Haddad, “but the bottom line is Twitter needs to provide us with more tokens for us to be able to sell at a lower the price.”

Given that statement I wonder what the pricing will be for Appbot for Mac, if they decide to create it? It’s obvious they’re limited to 100,000 tokens for Tweetbot, but App.Net has no such restriction and is being built as a communication service. Since Twitter changed direction to become an ad/sales/marketing tool App.Net has emerged as our next best bet and has been gaining traction ever since.

With Twitter recently breaking Twitter for Mac, and no apparent fix in the works, Tweetbot for Mac adds a fresh face to client app choices available to Mac owners.