Projects

It's been some time since our last posting on this blog. I don't have to tell you why.. the same procedure as every year: I have been busy as hell. It's not getting much better, but there's no need to. Wonder why? Because we have a co-author now supporting me in writing for this blog!

Welcome Martin to our blog! You've already seen his first article yesterday and I hope there are a lot more to come.

You are maybe wondering what has happened in the mean time? Well, mooter - my twitter client - is in a good process and I'm hoping to release a first public version soon. We already have a good testing team of some people and I am really looking forward to release the first public version.

Furthermore I bough a Motorola Milestone in the meantime (also known as "Droid") and will now digg into Android development, soon. This will become another topic on this blog and I hope I can deliver you with some goodies about android.

Now that's it for the moment, hope the "down time" in the last months did not smaller your interest in our articles! Just an additional info: Martin also has a twitter account, so let's follow him!

Today I'll give a first peek on my current project. Is it.. is.. uhm.. is it really a twitter client? Yeah, it is. Despite the fact that there are dozens of twitter clients out there I really wanted to make my own one. That's not because I think I can do it better (Twhirl is great!) but I wasn't able to find a good and free client for my Mac.

TweetDeck is too big in my opinion. Twitter is just a short messaging service, microblogging. So I expect the client to be as micro as the purpose of the service. Don't get me wrong, TweetDeck is great but just too big for me. Then we have Twhirl which is absolutely great and which is my default client on every system. BUT: running on my Mac (iBook G4) with two accounts active my fans immidiately start to blow. mooter (name to be defined ) should be a lightweight client for multiple accounts. A final design on how to manage seperate accounts is not yet ready. But I'm thinking of an intuitive way of combining the timelines of multiple accounts in one.

So these were the main reasons on why I started developing yet another twitter client. One reason though is: I just wanted to do something with the twitter API and see how it works. Additonally this is also an interesting approach for me on developing nice and interactive AIR desktop applications.

So, here's a first shot of my current version, showing the timeline and a notification bubble. Not much yet but tweeting and displaying the default timeline already works fine Even with automatic linking of hashtags, usernames and URLs.

And so here's my question: what do you really expect from a sleek and lightweight twitter client? Share your thoughts!