Dabr Helps Ai Weiwei!

I’ve written before about Dabr, the Twitter client I code for. Dabr helps people around the world and is used by some of Twitter’s most influential users.

Today, I am pleased to announce that Chinese artist, political prisoner, and sower of porcelain sunflower seed, Ai Weiwei uses dabr!

On last night’s Newsnight, as part of …

 
Displaying Twitter Photos via Entities

Twitter has announced that it will soon open up a native photo sharing service.

Rather than using an external service like Embed.ly to retrieve thumbnails, all the data is embedded within Twitter Entities.

So, if you request a status using “include_entities=true”, you will be able to grab the image and display the thumbnail using the following …

 
Dabr, Dabr, Everywhere...

I contribute code to Dabr – a mobile twitter client. It’s a great project to keep my hand in the world of PHP, APIs, SVN, and all the other tools that are essential to the modern online world.

Dabr’s strength for developers is two-fold

Dead easy to install. Unzip the files, fill in your …

 
Getting Images from a Foursquare Checkin

“Oi!” shouted Whatleydude, “Get Dabr to show images from foursquare checkins!”
“Righty-ho sir!” I said. I started coding furiously. Of course, things are never quite as simple as I first thought….

So, how do we go from http://4sq.com/fgIWov
to
?

1 Expand the URL
Get your Bit.ly API Key.

http://api.bitly.com/v3/expand
?shortUrl=http://4sq.com/fgIWov
&login=YOUR_BIT_LY_USERNAME

 

Looking for some Twitter API help.  Bit of a geeky post, this…

Pagination is the act of splitting data into logical  pages. Suppose I had a list of item, numbered 0 – 99.  If I want 20 items per page, it’s trivial to see that pagination looks like:
p1 = 0-19
p2 = 20-40
p3 = 41-61
p4 = …

 

I am no longer confused! Here is a quick tutorial in how to post images to Twitpic and Twitter when using OAuth. I’m indebted to Steve Corona of Twitpic, for his help with this.

You can see the full code on Dabr’s Google Code page.

First of all, you’ll need to have enabled OAuth …

 
Bugs in Twitter Text Libraries

The Twitter Engineering Team have a set of text processing classes which are meant to simplify and standardise the recognition of URLs, screen names, and hashtags. Dabr makes use of them to keep in conformance with Twitter’s style.

One of the advantages of the text processing is that it will recognise that www.example.com is …

 
Dabr - Reply to all and Geotagging

People have been very excited to see some new functionality in Dabr – the mobile Twitter client I develop for. But what is it and how does it work?

Reply to All
The @@ symbol allows you to reply to all the people mentioned within the tweet.
It only shows up on tweets which mention other …

 
Hashtags and Implicit Knowledge

What is “Implicit Knowledge”? Essentially it’s stuff that everyone knows, but no one has written down. Usually it’s something that people have worked out through their own experiences.

This sort of knowledge is common in life – but is fatal in computing and design. Take the following tweet I received.

The complaint was …

 
Don't Let Users Do Things They Can't Do

There are many “rules” when it comes to User Interface / User Experience design.  One that I try to stick to is “Don’t let users do things they can’t do.”

It’s one of my gripes with Linux.  If you’re editing a configuration file, you are relying on yourself to sanity check your input – often …

 
Twitter and Linebreaks

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 …

© 2011 Terence Eden has a BlogSuffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha

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