Twaddle

Good news everybody: I’ve just finished the final item on my TODO list for the 0.3 release. This means that all existing bugs have been fixed and all new features have been implemented. I’ve just put the first 0.3 release candidate build onto my phone and I’ll be keeping a close eye on it throughout the week. If there’s no major problems 0.3 should be released next weekend.

Thanks for waiting!

I do apologise for the delay on releasing the newest version of Twaddle. I guess this is a problem when you use free software developed by someone in their spare time, huh?

A couple of things have caused the delay of the latest version: Firstly my Real Job™ I was the Technical Lead on a very large project (since released successfully) which took up a lot of my time and motivation. I have also handed in my resignation and am currently looking for a new job. The upside of this is I’ll be taking a few weeks off before starting a new job. Time which I plan to devote to playing video games / coding Twaddle.

Secondly the announcement of Windows Phone 7, and what it means for developers of Windows Mobile apps, was a bit disheartening.

Thirdly: I’ve worked on a lot of the internals of Twaddle. This working means that third party developers will be able to write plugins for Twaddle. Don’t like the way it does notifications? Write your own! Want Twaddle to automatically hash tag things? Write a plugin! And so on, and so forth. This affects every aspect of Twaddle (The User Interface, background tasks, response to other events, etc) and required a fair amount of thought and tweaking. It also turned out to be a much bigger task than I’d initially anticipated. As to if any third party developers start writing plugins for Twaddle remains to be seen. But even if they don’t it will allow much quicker development of features for Twaddle, providing they fit within the existing model. I’ll release more technical details of this closer to the release date of 0.3 / if people are interested.

In the mean time, I apologise for the delay, but hope the delay will result in something everyone is really excited by.

It’s been a long time coming, but I’m excited to announce that Twaddle 0.2 is nearly here. I now consider 0.2 to be feature complete and am now going through the process of final testing before I release it. I’m hoping to have 0.2 released in time for Christmas (if only so I can lounge about and play computer games instead of coding), but can’t promise anything.

A partial list of features, to whet your appetite, include;

• A revamped interface
• Viewing mentions
• Sending, receiving and viewing direct messages
• Speed improvements
• Better UTF8 support

I’d hoped to have a 0.2 of Twaddle out by now, unfortunately that’s not been the case.

First off, I recently moved house which took a fair amount of time and effort to get packed / unpacked and have DSL connected at my new place. In addition to this I’ve had a few Uni assignments which took away even more time. In amongst all this my computer chair broke… I’ve purchased a new chair which won’t arrive for another 4 – 8 weeks. The dining chair I’m using in the mean time places a lot of strain on my back meaning I can only code for short periods of time.

Secondly, I’ve put a lot of work into making Twaddle a lot faster. On my HTC Touch Pro rotating the screen redraws virtually straight away and Twaddle continues to be responsive throughout the whole process. A vastly improved algorithm for laying out tweets (50 tweets get laid out in ~150ms on my phone) as well as moving non-visible layouts to a background process ensures Twaddle remains responsive throughout rotations. I’m still working on improving the speed of performing updates.

Long story short: 0.2 won’t be released as soon as I’d hoped as I’m putting a lot of work into it to ensure it far eclipses previous versions of Twaddle.