Tapbots Blog » Development

Tweetbot URL scheme

Paul Haddad — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 16:21:22 +0000

We’ve gotten a few questions on the URL scheme for Tweetbot and I wanted to have a post to point other developers to. This will be updated as we make changes for new versions. If you aren’t a developer please feel free to move on, not much to see here.

Valid as of version 1.0.2

tweetbot:///timeline
tweetbot:///mentions
tweetbot:///retweets
tweetbot:///direct_messages
tweetbot:///lists
tweetbot:///favorites
tweetbot:///search
tweetbot:///search?query=
tweetbot:///status/
tweetbot:///user_profile/
tweetbot:///post
tweetbot:///post?text=

The argument is optional. You may include it to go to a specific account or leave it blank and either the current or default user account will be chosen instead. As usual all query should be URL encoded and other then that everything should be pretty obvious.

Valid as of version 1.3

tweetbot:///post?text=&callback_url=&in_reply_to_status_id=
tweetbot:///search?query=&callback_url=
tweetbot:///status/?callback_url=
tweetbot:///user_profile/?callback_url=
tweetbot:///follow/
tweetbot:///unfollow/
tweetbot:///favorite/
tweetbot:///unfavorite/
tweetbot:///retweet/

The argument callback_url is an URL encoded URL that will be opened in Safari once the Post view closes.

Valid as of version 1.4

tweetbot:///list/?callback_url=

Any questions stick them below and I’ll update the docs as needed.

Much ado about 24 bytes

Paul Haddad — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 02:42:11 +0000

Sometimes in life there are questions with no clear answers. How many bytes in a kilobyte is one of those questions. Is it 1000 or 1024? It really depends on whom you ask. For better or worse we chose to use 1000 for a kilobyte and for 1024 we chose the IEC standard kibibyte. Read on for why we came to this decision.

There is no proper definition for a kilobyte. Most people think it’s 1024 bytes, however a number of organizations (IEC, IEEE, ISO, Drive Manufacturers, etc..) claim 1000. So we are left with a tough choice. Pick the value people expect or pick the value that the standards suggest. We’ve had similar questions to this in the past (like how many days in a year?) and I’ve always gone the way of the standard bodies. In this particular case, I thought long and hard about which way to go. I personally prefer a 1024 byte kilobyte, however if we had done that, what would we have called a 1000 byte block? Well, turns out that there is no alternative name for a 1000 bytes other then a kilobyte. On the other hand, a kibibyte is recognized as a 1024 byte block without any sort of ambiguity. So given all of that, I think the 1000 byte kilobyte was the least worst choice we could make.

Now I think one could argue that maybe the kilobyte should’ve been disabled and the kibibyte should be enabled by default. Of course the problem there is we’d end up getting a million emails with, “Where’s kilobyte?” or “What’s a kibibyte?” Maybe we should’ve just split the difference and used a 1012 byte kilobyte, so everyone would complain.

Converbot Quickie

Paul Haddad — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:23:40 +0000

Here’s a fast update of where we are at with Convertbot and what we are planning over the next few days.

Update (04/09/09) : Version 1.0.1 approved!

We are still waiting for Apple to approve our 1.0.1 update. After 6 days they rejected our first release for something UI related, this wasn’t any new behavior it was just something that whoever was reviewing that day didn’t like. We resubmitted the same day and are yet again waiting. If it follows the same pattern as before it should be approved (or I guess rejected) sometime very soon. We’ve sent a few emails out to Apple to try to speed up this process but unfortunately haven’t gotten any response. Again the only changes for this 1.0.1 release was the fixing of the comma issue and the addition of a few more currency units.

1.1 is on track for being submitted to Apple on Monday the 13th. This adds a number of new units and categories as well as the ability to enable/disable any category or unit. For anyone interested here is the list of categories and units we plan to support for 1.1. If you find anything missing send us an email at support@tapbots.com.

If you read this far here’s a sneak peak at 1.1.

The Convertbot Plan (Currencies, Releases and More)

Paul Haddad — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 17:27:54 +0000

We’ve been getting a lot of similar emails about Currencies, Units and what else is coming to Convertbot. This post is an attempt to clear some of that up.

Currencies

We currently grab the currency data from Yahoo twice an hour and serve that up from our servers to Converbot whenever it launches. The code currently grabs about 130 different currencies so pretty much anything that you’ve ever heard of, and a lot you haven’t, is available to Convertbot. For release 1.0 we hid the majority of these units from the UI because obviously you don’t want to have to rotate through 130 different units most of which you don’t care about. For 1.0.1 we’ve enabled a handful of other currencies but have still tried to keep the list manageable. We of course understand that even with 1.0.1 we aren’t going to please anyone with a small static list of currencies. Which is where 1.1 comes in.

Conversion Categories and Units

We wanted to ship with a manageable number of Conversion Categories and Units for our first release. Again the goal here is to not inundate you with a million choices a lot of which you’ll never use or care about. We patterned our choices after the Mac OS X conversion widget since that’s been around for a while and Apple does a good job of trimming down options. That being said we never expected this original list to be our final list of supported Categories and Units. We expect to add more as they are requested and we release new versions of Convertbot. If there’s some Category or Unit that’s missing from Convertbot and that you really want please let us know. The Convertbot code was built to support a number of different conversions and so adding new ones is relatively simple, in a lot of cases the hardest part is going to be doing the icon for the Category. Regardless of how many Categories and Units we add we still want to make the list manageable which again leads into 1.1.

1.1

Our top development priority right now is to get 1.1 finished up. The main new feature in 1.1 is going to be the ability to Show and Hide individual Categories and Units. This will allows us to add new Categories and Units without overwhelming the main interface. Most of the low level code to support this is already in place within Convertbot and the rest is pretty straight forward and simple The part that will take time is to get the UI for this designed and implemented. As everyone is hopefully aware we take a lot of pride in our unique look and feel. While most companies might just stick a set of standard elements to let you manipulate your selections we aren’t like most companies. Mark will design the UI, I’ll implement it and we’ll go through a number of different iterations to try to get it just right. This takes time but we think the result is worth it.

So when’s 1.1 going to be ready? Well the short answer is when it’s ready and not before. Longer answer, sometime in April is the most likely timeframe. We will post on our twitter account once we submit to Apple.

1.2

We’re not going to say much about 1.2 other then we plan to add at least one cool new feature that I don’t think anyone has really asked for but that will add a new dimension to Convertbot. We’re not sure when 1.2 will come out but we need to do a refresh of Weightbot before we can fully hit 1.2.

Localization

The last thing I want to talk about is Localization. We both think this is very important and Convertbot will be localized in multiple languages. And yes for our UK friends we do plan to support metre vs meter. The trickiest part about localization isn’t the localization itself, its what happens after an application is released. Suddenly instead of having two people being involved in a release it mushrooms to possibly over a dozen. All these folks are in different countries and have their own jobs to worry about, so release complexity increases quite a bit. Robert Heinlein coined the term TANSTAAFL and its very apropos for localization. For a normal application I’d like to get the second or third feature release to be the localized one, in other words 1.2 or 1.3. Convertbot, however, is not your typical application and I think its more important to have it localized sooner rather than later. Localization will happen, I’m just not sure if it’ll happen before or after 1.2 (and if its before it may cause 1.2 to be called 1.3).

Well that’s about all I had to say, please stay tuned we’ve got things in the pipeline. Again if you have any Category and/or Unit that you want let us know, feel free to add a comment and we’ll consider all the suggestions.

Tapbots Interviewed on the Mobile Orchard Podcast

Mark Jardine — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 22:46:14 +0000

Paul and I were recently interviewed on a developer podcast called Mobile Orchard. It gets a little geeky, but if you are at all interested in how we made Weightbot, give it a listen:

Tapbots Interviewed on the Mobile Orchard Podcast

Localizers Wanted

Paul Haddad — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 04:48:15 +0000

Bonjour, Guten Tag and Ciao. One of the main features of Weightbot 1.2 is localization for other languages. Right now we are planning on doing French, German, Italian and Japanese. We’ve got Japanese covered but we need help with the other 3. It should be fairly simple work if you speak any of those languages, its only ~75 simple strings, a few sentences and the product description in iTunes. Benefits include getting a hold of Beta builds before anyone else and well that’s it.

If your language isn’t covered above but you’d like to be involved please send us a note since we’ll likely expand the localizations in future releases.

Just send a note to support@tapbots.com and we’ll get back to you.

Thanks All!

Update 12/14/2008

We’ve gotten the following localized:

Danish
Dutch
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Portuguese (Brazilian and Portugal)
Swedish