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…
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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 …
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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 …
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I've written a very basic JIL widget to launch dabr. You can grab it from 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 i…
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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 r2…
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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…
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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…
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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 l…
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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"…
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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. …
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