Flutter is a light-weight iGoogle Twitter client and is the first of a number of small personal development projects I intend to release in the coming weeks and months.

It is offered as an alternative to the fairly heavy-weight user experiences offered by many of the existing iGoogle-based solutions. All tweets, including replies and direct messages are re-threaded into a single feed to avoid switching between multiple tabs:

As the post title suggests, Flutter is currently in beta and, while I encourage everyone to give it a try, do expect to find a few pesky little bugs. I look forward to hearing about all such occurrences and will endeavour to fix them as soon as humanly possible. (Contact details can be found on the about page.)

Give it a shot: Add Flutter to iGoogle

Not an iGoogle user? Check out the standalone version.

On Authentication

Currently authentication is performed by passing users’ credentials directly through a POST request to Twitter via the server hosting jbmorley.co.uk. I am well aware this is exceptionally in-elegant; it merely serves as an interim solution until OAuth support has been implemented so please bear with me.

The Future

Suggestions and recommendations are always gratefully received. I am personally considering providing TweetDeck-like behaviour in the Canvas view, but this will require some internal rearchitecting so it’s some ways off right now…

When synchronizing with an iPod or iPhone, iTunes offers two key options: ‘x least recent unwatched’ or ‘x most recent unwatched’. Unfortunately for us users, recent is determined, not by sensible things such as air-date or episode number, but by the date items are added to a user’s iTunes library. All works fine when items are purchased from the iTunes Music Store and downloads complete in order. Encounter a few failed downloads or add items manually however and iPod synchronization never again works as one might reasonably expect.

Since we, as users, have suffered this strange behaviour for a good number of iTunes releases, I can only assume that somewhere in Cupertino it’s deemed a feature (although I have yet to work out what it achieves).

Fortunately, for OS X users, AppleScript comes to the rescue:

tell application "iTunes"
 
	if selection is {} then
		display dialog "Select some TV Shows..." buttons {"Cancel"} default button 1 with icon 2 giving up after 15
	end if
 
	set sel to selection
 
	repeat with i from 1 to (count sel)
		set t to item i of sel
		tell t
 
			set my_kind to TV show
			set filename to location
			set my_state to unplayed
			set my_played_count to played count
			delete
			set my_track to (add filename)
			tell my_track
				set video kind to TV show
				set unplayed to my_state
				set played count to my_played_count
			end tell
 
		end tell
	end repeat
end tell

The above script iterates over the selected items in iTunes, sequentially deleting them and then re-adding them. Assuming this list of TV Shows is in the correct order, this will ensure all ‘added’ times are sequential and iPod and iPhone synchronization should now proceed as expected.

Much has happened since my last weblog (considered) posting so this collection of comments is by way of a summary of some of those events.

February took Junko and I to Hanamaki, the home of Miyazawa Kenji, for some rest and relaxation. It proved wonderfully slow and middle-aged place with a little snow remaining from the winter.

Since returning from a second trip to Japan this year, I have now decided that it’s time to leave Symbian (now Nokia) and move to pastures anew. It’s currently unclear where this will lead me but I certainly hope to tidy up a few personal software projects on the way; there are at least a couple of iPhone applications in the works and the Android Dev Phone 1 is sitting patiently on the side.¹

The last few months have been a fairly unsettled and over the last year and a half I have lived in more hotels than I care to consider. For the time being however, I have found myself space with Alan and Mike and enjoying feeling a little more grounded. Cheshunt is a gorgeous little commuter village outside London and the recent weather afforded me a collection of photos².

¹ More details coming soon.

² Anyone looking for photos hosted on MobileMe will be sorely disappointed. After far too long trying to maintain more than one system, I’ve finally given up and given my allegiance to Flickr.

These days, it’s seems a rarity that I comment on software and, as most people are aware, even less common that I criticise Apple. This time, I couldn’t resist.

In the last couple of weeks, both Microsoft and Apple have simultaneously released upgrades to their music players supporting music profiling, allowing users to generate playlists of similar music on-the-fly.

While this technology has been in play in services such as Last.fm for some time now, it seems Apple still have some way to go — recommending your users try listening to a different song seems to be missing the point somewhat:

This is going to make things interesting:

BBC — Nokia in full buy-out of Symbian