Twitter now allows people to upload videos directly to the micro-blogging platform. It's an attempt to bypass 3rd party sites like YouTube (owned by Google) and Instagram (owned by Facebook). In an uncharacteristic display of openness, Twitter's API allows developers to get direct access to video. This is a quick blog post to explain how you get access, and what you can do with the…
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Twitter has just launched embedded videos in Tweets. How can we, as app designers, present them to our users? So, what options do we have? First of all, let's take a look at what the Twitter API provides. Send a signed request to : https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/show/560070183650213889.json In return, we get these entities : "entities": { "hashtags": [], "symbols": [], …
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I've been playing around with PVoutput.org - it's a community site which lets you quickly and easily publish live details of your solar panels. I couldn't see a pre-built library for my model of Solar Power Inverter - the Fronius - so I thought I'd build one. Important: the PVoutput API doesn't run over HTTPS. All of your communications with it are in the clear. While there's a limit to the …
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Update! There's a new way to do this - read my latest post to find out how. Two or three years ago, I was contacted by a recruiter from Google. They wanted to know if I'd be interested in working for the advertising giant. We played the usual game of dancing around salary and schedules, when he dropped the bombshell - they were looking for people to work on Google+. I asked the recruiter if…
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As some of you may know, I'm writing a series of short stories to help young people learn how to code. One of the things I wanted to do was introduce the concept of using RESTful APIs. It's so powerful to show people that they can retrieve information from the Internet and then manipulate it in software. Originally, I had wanted to use Twitter and Flickr as examples - they're both fairly well…
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There is a new API in town! HTML5 will (soon) let you make the user's device vibrate. What fun! Obviously, it's useful for triggering alerts, improved immersivness during gameplay, and all sorts of other fun things like sending Morse Code messages via vibration. At the moment, Chrome (and other Android browsers) ask for permission before accessing features such as geo-location, camera,…
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I've only had my solar panels for a few weeks, but I'm already trying to hook them up to the Internet of Things. I'm using the Fronius DataManager card. The API is fairly well documented - but you should be aware that it offers no authentication! The API is Read-Only - but I would still recommend against opening up your firewall to allow unfettered access. Aim I want to draw a (static) graph …
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I was recently given 3 rather locked-down network cameras. Each camera was pre-programmed to communicate with a specific website, and only attach to a predefined wireless access point. Naturally, there was no supplied username or password. I thought about how I might get access. Using a man-in-the-middle attack to sniff the password, or trying to dump the firmware and examine that. Sadly,…
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As part of my quest to ensure I have a reasonable backup of all my social media data, I've been investigating ho easy it is to export photos from TwitPic. I've been using TwitPic since 2008 and have uploaded 1,200 images there. There's no official export function for TwitPic. The services which used to exist relied on their RSS feeds - which have since been killed off. This little Python…
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You can't. I mean, not officially. There's nothing in the API documentation, and all my attempts to contact Twitter on this matter have been ignored. If you're getting abuse on Twitter you have to use the official Twitter clients to report people. No matter that 3rd party clients may be better at protecting your privacy, offering you a sanitised view of the people tweeting you, or enable you…
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Earlier this week, I wrote about the Future of AudioBoo. I'm sure the service is going to be just fine - but thought it would be an interesting exercise to liberate my data from there just in case. As I begin the move to decentralised services where possible, I think it's important that I take responsibility for my own data. The API docs for AudioBoo are very clear, so here's a quick guide on…
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Twitter makes a lot of money out of me. At least, I assume so. The code I helped write, and the sites I run, are used by millions of Tiwtter's users. I've sent a tonne of traffic their way, and what has Twitter given me? Not even a "thank you." Seriously, no one from Twitter has ever said "Thanks for all the customers. Thanks for helping develop our presence in certain markets. Thanks…
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