As any student of computer science knows, line breaks are confusing. There are styles of line breaks unique to Unix, Mac and Windows - so what should a web renderer do when faced with a newline command? In HTML, it's simple, they should be ignored. But what when it is user generated text, not HTML? This was a problem I faced when trying to get Dabr to render the ASCII* art produced by Aral Balkan's Feathers App. Feathers uses line breaks to achieve images like... 〰❀❃ Introducing ❃❀〰 My new i…
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Twitter have announced that all third party site will have to use OAuth. You will no longer be able to just type in your username and password to get access to Twitter via your favourite web client. Usually, I would be a big fan of this move - especially if it forces password anti-pattern sites like TwitPic to implement the new, secure standard. This means that you won't be able to log in to a third party site by giving them your username and password. You will have to use OAuth to se…
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I'm a big fan of OAuth - despite some claims to the contrary. It's an excellent way of teaching people not to stick their username and password into any old site which asks for it. Which is why I'm so incredibly disappointed in Twitter's implementation of mobile OAuth. For a service which started out operating by SMS, Twitter takes a surprisingly unenlightened view of mobile. It's main mobile service - http://m.twitter.com/ - is almost completely devoid of useful features. That's one of…
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I've written a very basic JIL widget to launch dabr. You can grab it from https://shkspr.mobi/Dabr.wgt I've tested this to work on the Vodafone 360 H1 - but it should work with any JIL handset. Because it isn't certified, you may need to dial *#35767# to remove the H1's security check. The code is very simple. The JIL SDK allows you to call specific phone application - in this case, all I've done is invoked the browser. <body> <script type="text/javascript"> W…
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A quick explanation of how I integrated AudioBoo and Phreadz with Dabr. I'm a big fan of AudioBoo - for those who don't know it, AudioBoo allows you to record some audio on your phone and then publish it to the web. It's like instant podcasting. Originally only for the iPhone, AudioBoo now works on Android and there's an S60 version comeing out "soon". I'm very proud to announce that as of r260 - Dabr now support AudioBoo! It all started with a tweet from David Carrington (creator of Da…
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Seesmic, a service I've not tried before, have released a Twitter client for the BlackBerry. Is it any good? How does it compare with the features of Dabr or the usability of UberTwitter? Find out! Getting the client was fairly simple, but could be better. Simply visiting http://seesmic.com was enough to bring up a mobile friendly page with download instructions. However, scrolling down presented this mess. You simply can't rely on users to know what make, model or firmware version they…
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I've decided to add a preview of YouTube videos into Dabr, the mobile Twitter service. The code is fairly simple - although I still suck at regular expressions. if (preg_match_all('#youtube.com/watch?v=([_-dw]+)#', $tmp, $matches, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER) > 0) { foreach ($matches[1] as $match) { $images[] = theme('external_link', "http://m.youtube.com/watch?v={$match}", "<img src='http://i.ytimg.com/vi/{$match}/1.jpg' class='twitpic' />"); } } Here's how it looks. A user writes a …
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I hate shortened URLs with a passion. It makes it hard to see what a link is and whether I've visited it before. If they fail - like tr.im threatened to do - you lose your links with no way to see where they once went. So, hurrah for LongURLPlease - a service which takes those horrid little links and turns them in to full sized URLs. Here's the basic code in PHP to use the service. function long_url($shortURL) { //Use the LongURLPlease API $url = "…
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Woooo! Twestival! YAYAYAYAY! Errr... Well, no. Not really. After the success of last year's London Twestival, I thought this one would be even better. Looks like I was wrong. Let's start with...The GoodOnce again, it's impossible to feel anything other that gratitude and humbleness in the face of the sheer amount of effort, determination and self-sacrifice that goes in to making a "happening" on this scale. Kudos to Amanda, Ben and everyone else who worked so hard.Getting people all over the …
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Twitter == Addictive. CrackBerry == Addictive. Twitter + BlackBerry == toxic levels of addictivenessicity. This is a quick review of some of the mobile Twitter interfaces and how well they work on the BlackBerry. I'm just looking at mobile web interfaces (for now). Mobile Twitter First off - the official mobile Twitter interface - http://m.twitter.com It's fairly plain and uninteresting. At the bottom of the screen, we see a few options. You can even perform basic follow / unfollow…
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