December, 2007

general / software — 3 Comments
18
Dec 07

Twitterrific 3.0.1 ads cause eye bleed

After updating to Leopard and reinstalling all my software again, I was disappointed to find out that the new version of Twitterrific (3.0.1) now contains huge advertisements within the Twitter feed. I’m not against advertising when its small and doesn’t hinder the experience of the software, but the advertising in Twitterrific makes my eyes bleed. Surely the same result could be achieved by thinner ads, or make them look more like twitter updates.

Anyway, I rummaged through my downloads folder and managed to find the previous version of Twitterrific (2.1). I have uploaded it here if anyone wants to grab it. Functionally it is exactly the same, minus a few options in the preferences window. There are a lot more functionality in the new version, but if you are like me and use Twitterrific to keep in touch with your Twitter activity, you won’t need these options anyway!

I am by no means trying to stop people downloading the new version, just providing a link to the older version for those interested.

Download Twitterrific 2.1

example / technical — 1 Comment
12
Dec 07

JSON-APML Tag Cloud

As a member of the APML Google group, I’m constantly reading and keeping in touch with the APML developments. The latest development that sparked my interest was the need for a JSON equivalent of the APML standard which could be used as a more lightweight interchange format for more efficient web application implementations of the APML spec.

David Novakovic put his hand up to start working on the JSON-APML spec, and naturally, I decided to give him a hand. We decided to make the JSON-APML spec as close to the XML version as possible without the bloat of XML. You can read more about the spec proposed over at the JSON-APML Google Groups thread. Feel free to join the group and give your thoughts about the spec proposed.

Given this spec, I decided to do a quick working example of using the JSON-APML format. The example I created uses a service created by Paul Lamere over at Tastebroker. Paul’s script scrapes profile data from various websites, and returns a well-formed APML feed. My script uses these feeds as a base for conversion into the JSON-APML spec.

How it works:

The demo connects to a server with user and service information. The server then scrapes Paul’s APML feeds for a given user/service, parses the APML into JSON-APML and returns it to the browser. The browser then formats the data into a tag cloud using javascript.

Check the example of APML-JSON out.