twitter

Finally, I got in to use Twitter’s new Fabric platform. Here’s the scoop.

I finally got an email from Twitter giving me the green light to use Fabric. Before I go into the service, I thought I’d share the funny little welcome letter I received.

Not the greatest first impression for a product being released by a multi-billion dollar company. It looks like it was sent to me accidently by a Nigerian businessman looking for someone in America to give his millions to. Luckily the experience improved from there 😉

Fabric attempts to “stitch together” all the components required in building great applications such as crash analytics, managing builds, sign-in, and ads. The latter two obviously tie in directly with Twitter’s business model and exposes what the end-game for this free service is; I don’t think it calls into question the value or like-ability of Fabric. As long as the free service they offer works well, there are no tricky “catches”, and it is doing more to help the developer than pushing Twitter’s agenda I’m happy.

First Take on Using Fabric

I am really digging how well they integrated the service with my Mac and XCode. The guided installation tour was amazingly smooth. Usually, when a tool attempts to integrate multiple platforms locally on a client (e.g. Mac OS, XCode, Fabric, iTunesConnect) the solution must take into account a multitude of unknown variables between them. Managing those variables makes it difficult to create a robust, smooth, experience, but for me it worked seamlessly (no pun intended.)

Fabric comes as an application you install on your machine and (for Mac) it is added to your menu bar alongside other tools like Dropbox, Cloud App, your WiFi indicator and clock.

Once installed Fabric pops open a step-by-step guide detailing what you need to do to integrate the SDK into your project. The built-in guide allows you to select the project you wish to integrate from your project repo along with all the SDK files and lines of code required; it does so elegantly and with minimal clicks. The platform also listens to your XCode build process to make sure you’ve integrated the tool correctly.

After you have successfully integrated the SDK, a dashboard becomes available for your project to monitor your integration.

Another feature I found quite interesting was their beta testing integration. I’ve been using the newly released Apple TestFlight integration which is a major improvement to both Test Flight (a recent Apple acquisition) and Apple’s iTunes connect provisioning service. Fabric has built in their version of a testing platform that allows you to invite beta users to test your app through Crashlitics. I’ll give it a shot, but the new Test Flight and XCode pre-release workflow is pretty damn easy, and Fabrics layer doesn’t seem to be adding much value.

I’ll keep playing with the platform but as of now, with the projects I am working on, the Crashlytics is the only thing I’ll be using from the suite; followed by Twitter login. I am curious to see how much using this SDK will interfere with my usage of the FB login SDK, but I’ll leave that for another post.

Todays Tech: Editorial

Being part of the industrial revolution must have been amazing. I use to wish I was around during a revolution of that size as I would have wanted to take risks and catch the business wave as early as I could. Like being around when Bill Gates started MicroSoft. How could people have thought it was a fad, or rejected such an practical, obvious, beneficial product? Computers and software changed the way life happens and a majority of the population were/are late adopters. These last few years have been the beginning of yet another great revolution in my eyes and I wasn’t going to pas it up. I cant believe how many thought/think the technologies of today are a fad, many of those nah sayers who argued in my and coworkers face and mocked the industries goals are forgotten (lucky for them) and from only 1 year ago! More and more are getting on the ride. Im glad I started giving it my all early on, no regrets.

We still have a long way to go. Those who said Facebook was a fad are now on FaceBook with the rest of their family and friends and use it fairly often. What’s more disturbing is how often I over hear people on FaceBook or in passing that scream how much Twitter is a useless fad……I guess we just need to give them a few years in which I suspect that they will be bashing yet another new technology, but will do it using Twitter.

Even the most basic and useful forums of social media get bashed to this day, often purely for cultural reasons in which technology in many peoples eyes equal sub par information and practicality. I don’t know how many times I’ve over heard intelligent people bashing any information found on Wikipedia. Although not perfect it’s easy to for get that Webster and Britannica were all originally missions of one man traveling the globe. One man one perspective asking strangers and alike what they knew to be knowledge of the earth and its inhabitants. Accuracy is subjective and in this case a multitude of subjective persons might be more powerful and “true” then a single man is the final say.

Let’s try harder to find use in things that catch on or connect us all, that increase our perspective across greater bounds whether it be 100% accurate or not. If we are brought together and information is shared more readily then we are only following a path set thousands of years before us first with smoke signals, then to written stone, bibles, printed news, telegraphs and phones, radio and TV, internet and social media. Let us allow ourselves to find the good, as we have so reluctant at each point of our past, in connecting with one another and decipher the positive gains in mediums that do just that.

Give a hoot track your tweets

There are many apis that offer shortening of urls tinyurl.com, tinyurl.cc, bit.ly and many others which have all been useful over the years as services that take a URL like this: http://www.seanshadmand.com/2009/07/18/give-a-hoot-track-your-tweets/ and convert it to a url like this: http://tinyurl.com/len47k. Once the tiny url is clicked a user is quickly redirected to the true url of the site.

Now, with the advent of the Facebook status and more recently Twitter tweets, fitting text based information into a very small space is ever more important and shortening URL’s has become big business and an interesting space to be in for startups these days. (check out some techcrunch articles here at http://bit.ly/jytKD and http://ow.ly/hWSV).

I have recently been turned on to yet another player in the field found at http://ow.ly. This url shortner is provided by a comapny called HootSuite and not only provides shortened urls but aggregates all of your twitter feeds in to one place and allows you to quickly convert all urls within a tweet into shortened ow.ly based urls. The cool thing is those shortened url’s also provide tracking analysis so you can see how many people clicked your link in a line graph inline with all of your posts. Pretty cool, if you twitter at all or can find it usefull to track a urls number of clicks beit through an email or web site give ow.ly or hootsuite a try.

Twitter Quandry

In this first week of my entering into the blog/twitter posting arena I figured I would ask anyone out there a basic question on etiquette. How many twitter posts should one post a day that respects the balance between informative and just too damn noisy.

If you think you have a list of what makes a good tweet vs. a bad one let me know, I am curious whether “ughhhhh my steak is burnt” is allowable and at what rate people will let it through without un-following.

Here are some posts of what others have had to say:

http://realestatezebra.com/5-rules-for-using-twitter

http://odeo.com/episodes/24599142-Spy-On-Me-or-5-Rules-of-Twitter-by-HotForWords

http://sbinfocanada.about.com/od/socialmedia/a/twitterpromo.htm

http://mashable.com/2008/12/08/how-to-quiet-the-twitter-noise/

Twitter, Facebook, and Blogging – oh my!

Here is a simple breakdown of some popular communication-based internet technologies, in plain English. Hopefully, it will help give readers a better understanding of the basic abilities, purposes, and differences these tools provide.

For each technology, I attached an “In Plain English” video to help explain the usage of the technology. In Plain English became popular in 2008 for their extremely basic no frills explanation of – things. So click on the link for each technology to get a quick breakdown.

Blogs:

Facebook and social networking

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