Twitter has finally turned off all basic authentication and gone over to using oauth. I knew this was coming, I had no excuse to wait to upgrade various Twitter scripts used by MMISoftware, and also the plugins on the range of blogs we host, but I did. So, what did I learn?

First, don’t wait until the last minute!

Upgrading Applescripts: This was interesting. In basic authentication you could just use curl, but with oath this was not the case. It turns out the solution was (for me) to use twurl – source. The twurl site does a good job of explaining the process. Basically, install twurl (in terminal) with:

sudo gem install twurl

and then authorise twurl with:

$ twurl authorize --consumer-key the-key --consumer-secret the-secret

Where the-key and the-secret are obtained from the Twitter Developer site, and are specific for your Twitter account.

Once the-key and the-secret are added to twurl you are prompted for a pin that is obtained via the Twitter Developer site. All fairly straight forward.

To use twurl from the command-line you just type:

twurl -d "status=This is a twurl test" /1/statuses/update.xml

which will post ‘This is a twurl test’ to the Twitter account you used to set up twurl on the Twitter Developer site.

You can then use twurl in your AppleScript by using a ‘do shell script’. For example:

set results to do shell script "twurl -d " & twitter_status & " /1/statuses/update.xml"

where twitter_status could be ‘status=Testing twurl with a location&lat=37.7821120598956&long=-122.400612831116′, which would ‘geolocate’ (geocode) the Twitter post ‘Testing twurl with a location’ with the latitude and longitude coordinates 37.7821120598956 and -122.400612831116, respectively.

Upgrading the blogs: I use the excellent Twitter Tools By Crowd Favorite, these work great. Twitter Tools post tweets of new blog posts, and log tweets back to your blog. This all worked great with basic authentication and version 2.4 seems to work very well with oauth. Crowd Favorite have done a very good job with their instructions to walk you through the process of getting your site registered at Twitter Developer, and getting all the various keys and tokens needed to get oauth working. Thanks….

MMISoftware has just released snowNews, an iPhone and iPod Touch App (App Store Link), for keeping up to date with news from ski and boarding results around the world.

snowNews was an interesting App to write. It started ‘life’ as a ‘proof of concept’ web app written in HTML5. Coding was very easy, and was carried out in Dashcode (a quite wonderful and often overlooked javascript/css/html5 development tool on the Mac). The App took only a few hours to put together, mainly because of the great rss/xml handing features in Dashcode.

The web app provided useful, and functional. So development started on a Cocoa version…. and then…. PhoneGap.

PhoneGap is an incredibly cool piece of ‘software’. As they say on the PhoneGap site: “PhoneGap is an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript.”, and “If you’re a web developer who wants to build mobile applications in HTML and JavaScript while still taking advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android and Blackberry SDKs, PhoneGap is for you.” Great, In thought. I will give it a go.

Basically, all I had to do was drop the web App developed in Dashcode in to the PhoneGap project and compile. Done. App finished, and it now ran as a native iPhone App.

In fact, snowNews (App Store Link) is the quickest and easiest App we have ever developed. Total development time (including testing), about 2 days.

And it gets better….

The App was submitted to the iTunes App store on Sunday 13 December, 2009 and it went live on Saturday December 19, 2009…. Less than 6 days? The last App we submitted took around 3 weeks…. way to go Apple. And in the last 9 hours the App has been downloads around 20,000 times (if the mobclix data is correct.)

MMISoftware has just released snowNews, an iPhone and iPod Touch App (App Store Link), for keeping up to date with news from ski and boarding results around the world.

snowNews was an interesting App to write. It started ‘life’ as a ‘proof of concept’ web app written in HTML5. Coding was very easy, and was carried out in Dashcode (a quite wonderful and often overlooked javascript/css/html5 development tool on the Mac). The App took only a few hours to put together, mainly because of the great rss/xml handing features in Dashcode.

The web app provided useful, and functional. So development started on a Cocoa version…. and then…. PhoneGap.

PhoneGap is an incredibly cool piece of ‘software’. As they say on the PhoneGap site: “PhoneGap is an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript.”, and “If you’re a web developer who wants to build mobile applications in HTML and JavaScript while still taking advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android and Blackberry SDKs, PhoneGap is for you.” Great, In thought. I will give it a go.

Basically, all I had to do was drop the web App developed in Dashcode in to the PhoneGap project and compile. Done. App finished, and it now ran as a native iPhone App.

In fact, snowNews (App Store Link) is the quickest and easiest App we have ever developed. Total development time (including testing), about 2 days.

And it gets better….

The App was submitted to the iTunes App store on Sunday 13 December, 2009 and it went live on Saturday December 19, 2009…. Less than 6 days? The last App we submitted took around 3 weeks…. way to go Apple. And in the last 9 hours the App has been downloads around 20,000 times (if the mobclix data is correct.)

theSnowSite.com first iPhone/iPod Touch App, snowNews, went live on the iTunes App store (App Store Link) just over 8 hours ago. So far the App has been downloaded around 14,000 times.

snowNews is a feed of news from skiing and snowboarding resorts around the world. The news is from official tweets from the ski areas, supplemented with news provided by theSnowSite.com from ski areas. snowNews uses twitter’s list feature to collect ‘official’ tweets provided by ski areas.

With snowNews (App Store Link) you can keep track of what is happening, where and when, at the different ski and riding areas. It is a great way to keep up with latest news of snow conditions, weather, special offers, and events.

The snowNews opening screen

Latest Available News

Drilling down to read the full story and additional information

All the recent news from a ski area