Readability Blog: “One of the more useful tools in the Readability toolbox has been our link shortener, rdd.me. The interesting bit about rdd.me is simple: When an article is linked to through rdd.me, it offers up the availability to view the content in a clean, readable view.”
Get to building! If you need some Objective-C to talk to rdd.me, you’re in the right place.
Take a look at RFRddMe.
Earlier this week Dave Winer pointed out some neat stuff Readability was up to. Part of the piece pointed out a new URL shortener. I marked it and came back to it today. Since I love writing code to talk to RESTful web services, why not write another one?
This afternoon I started on RFRddMe, an Objective-C library for the Readability Shortener Service. Late this afternoon I completed the library, and I checked it into my GitHub Repository tonight. Figuring out git submodules took a bit of time, but it works as advertised.
If you just happen to be looking for Objective-C code to shorten a URL, and add an article to Readability, look no further.
Get the code for RFRddMe on GitHub.
Please, drop me a line, rob.fahrni@gmail.com, if you use the code.
Enjoy.
Nick Bradbury: “I wrote the first version of HomeSite back in 1994, and seventeen years later I can still run it on the latest version of Windows.
I created FeedDemon 1.0 in 2003, and it was the first app I wrote that relied on web APIs. Now those APIs no longer exist, and almost every version of FeedDemon since then has required massive changes due to the shifting sands of the web APIs I’ve relied on.”
Scripting News: “1. If you make a Twitter client, you have a bit of time to get out of that business. If you were thinking about writing one, don’t.”
I haven’t read the entire “consistency and ecosystem” post but there’s a lot of language in there around do’s and don’ts. A lot of it is to help make the service as good as it can possibly be, you don’t want, or need, a bunch of spammers abusing the API’s, right? Me neither, but what about Twitter advertising, or things like the #dickbar that had users of the Twitter iPhone client up in arms? What if your client WAS REQUIRED to show the #dickbar? How would you feel about that? Probably not so good.
Is it time for that distributed “Twitter-like” service without the single authority? Maybe.
If you’re a Twitter Client developer you’d better read the new Twitter API Terms of Service, now.
Tapbots Blog: “What are their intentions? If it’s just to provide an official free client for users, that’s great. But we need to know if they’ll continue to welcome and encourage 3rd party clients to keep going. They also need to give us a fair chance to succeed by not giving their official client an unfair advantage when it comes to accessing the API. There are so many unanswered questions right now. We are aware of their dev conference this week, Chirp. We aren’t attending, but hopefully good news will come from this event.” – First off, these guys make great software. Second, they have the right attitude regarding the Twitter acquisition of Tweetie. They’re hoping it doesn’t kill off their product, but they’re not yelling and screaming about it. It’s the right way to approach it. Regardless of the outcome I’m sure they’ll continue to bring us great software, and that’s what it’s all about.