Henrik Carlsson's Blog

All things me.

Making a replacement for Twitter?

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Were I a Twitter client developer, I would get in touch with other client developers and start talking about a way to do what Twitter does but that doesn’t require Twitter itself (or any specific company or service).

[…]

Under the hood, following somebody is really just subscribing to a feed of their statuses. Posting is really just updating a feed of your own statuses.1

Brent Simmons writes about Twitter’s changes to its API rules and threats to third party developer. He brings up an interesting idea, that developers could create their own decentralized Twitter-like experience.2

Sure it would likely be just for geeks, but I think third party clients are almost exclusively used by more or less geeky people and Twitter itself was once used solely by geeks.


  1. inessential.com: Matthew on Twitter Restrictions 
  2. There’s also a follow up post called More Details 

Nisse Hellberg @ Peace & Love 2012

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Nisse Hellberg & Peace & Love 2012
Nisse Hellberg & Peace & Love 2012

You can find more pictures from Peace & Love 2012 on my Flickr Page.

Will Twitter make me stop using Twitter?

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In the early days, the third-party ecosystem was a playground, in which developers could, and did, come up with uses for the service that were never intended or dreamed of by Twitter itself. You like the word ‘tweet’? The bird icon? The character counter? The replies and conversations features? A nice native client on the iPhone? All done first by third-party developer Iconfactory with its Twitterrific app.1

To me, this is still the very thing that makes Twitter appealing. I’m a happy Twitterrific user, not a happy Twitter user. If third party clients would disappear, it’s very possible that I might stop using Twitter.

Facebook tries to intercept its users e-mail

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In other words, Facebook silently inserted themselves into the path of formerly-direct unencrypted communications from people who want to email me. In other contexts, this is known as a Man In The Middle (MITM) attack. What on earth do they think they are playing at?1

Customer or cattle?

Retina MacBook Pro beats Mac Pro in speed-tests

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In a real-world test (”clean build Adium”) my 2.7Ghz i7 Protina just bested my 3.33Ghz 6-core Westmere by 2 seconds.

Holy. Shit.1

Holy shit, indeed.

Pushing 15 million pixels with the Retina MacBook Pro

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Including the built-in Retina display, the new 2012 MacBook Pro 15″ can run four displays at their native resolution.1

Simply amazing!2

Forget Your Past – Timothy Allen | Photography | Film

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Forget Your Past – Timothy Allen | Photography | Film.

Fabulous photos of a really evocative building. Check it out!

Competitors, start your copiers!

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From MacWorlds ”Hands on with the Retina MacBook Pro:

(Keep in mind, the original MacBook Air was another $2000-plus product that arrived a bit early, but within a few years the Air had become the lowest-cost, most mainstream Apple laptop. This is the path this new MacBook Pro is now on.)1

I agree! Competitors to Apple should definitely start their copiers and start churning out Retina MacBook Pro knock-offs, because it’s likely the direction the computer world will head in pretty soon.

David Smith on iOS 6

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In Episode #54 of Developing Perspective David Smith talks about why he thinks Apple more or less confirmed that the new iPhone will have a bigger screen.

Developing Perspective is a podcast discussing news of note in iOS Development, Apple and the like. Never longer than 15 minutes.1

If you’re interested in mobile development in general, or iOS development and/or Apple in particular you should definitely check out Developing Perspective. It’s short, focused and states a clear opinion.

”This changes everything” in Safari and Web Apps

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<input type=”file” >

Finally, it’s here. You can now upload photos and videos from the Photo Library using a regular input element. This was previously only possible via the use of Phonegap etc.

This is a real game changer for mobile apps.1

Apple unveiled a lot of interesting things at the start of their WWDC this Monday. There’s been a lot of talk about new hardware, hardware that weren’t updated and new things in Mountain Lion and iOS but the fact that it seems like Safari in iOS 6 will support the <input type=”file” /> element has largely been overlooked.

I myself have a couple of ideas of apps that I’d like to build, but I don’t have the knowledge necessary to build them in Objective C and I currently don’t have the time to acquire that knowledge. I do, however, have the knowledge necessary to do those things using HTML, CSS and JavaScript with a PHP backend. The problem with this is that web apps in iOS can’t do some of the things that native apps can. For example, up until now it’s been impossible to upload pictures taken with your iPhone to your blog/web page/facebook/twitter etc. without using a natively built client.

To me, ”this changes everything”. Enabling the same (limited) access to the filesystem from web apps as from native apps is a huge boost for those of us that has an interest in web technologies. I can’t wait to try it out for real.2


  1. Nothing Insightful • What iOS 6 Mobile Safari Offers Front End Devs 
  2. I don’t have an extra iOS device to install the beta on, and I don’t want to install it on my main devices, so I’ll likely have to wait until they’re released as stable versions.