Alex Bosworth's Weblog
previous projects: alchemy, swik, open source stuff, now adylitica.
Twitter breaking API rule #1
Rule #1 when you publish an API - if you change how it works, warn people ahead of time or at the very least: add the change to the changelog or api blog!
Twitter recently silently disabled the ability for API users to find friends on twitter based on friends’ email addresses.
I wasn’t too happy about this because I wrote a tool to find friends on twitter so that I wouldn’t have to give Twitter access to my gmail account. I published that tool earlier, so if you are wondering why it is broken, this is why.
Also bad: the broken call returns success instead of an error response, so even though I wrote error handling code in case of Twitter server errors, my code to handle stuff breaking broke :(
To be fair to Twitter, I realize that their job to keep spam off their system is enormous, and many competing services don’t offer as comprehensive and simple API as they do.
Still, if you already have someone’s email address, it doesn’t seem like too much of a violation to know their twitter account. The real bad guys will probably just adapt by end-running this: adding email contacts to fake gmail accounts and then using the gmail contacts lookup, so in the end only the legitimate developers wind up losing.
Make: Online : Fluid sculpture from plastic tubing
Someone should make a business of selling nifty ‘maker’ type stuff to people who are too lazy to actually be makers.
Trying out JQuery
I’ve looked at JQuery before, but hadn’t really played around with it until recently.
I’m a prototypejs kind of guy, but jquery is so similar that it’s easy to switch.
There are a lot of small differences, but overall I would say that JQuery feels a lot like Prototype lite. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: JQuery is a lot faster to download than prototype, it’s easier to learn, and a lot of what it’s missing is too high concept or edge-case to be used in most javascript coding tasks anyways.
My major issue with Prototype is that I hate script.aculo.us. Although I haven’t used JQuery UI, it looks less powerful but faster and more consistent across browsers, which are the major issues with script.aculo.us. However you can always implement your own effects and just ignore script.aculo.us.
Overall, I would say that if you are going for a very intensive Javascript project, I would still use Prototype, especially if your project wasn’t effects intensive and you wanted to focus on robustness and maintainability of code, because JQuery offers less sophisticated abstract programming helpers.
If you are working on a project with just a small to medium amount of Javascript, or even small to start and may potentially grow, JQuery is probably the best option and seems to have the traction now. Since Prototype is closely tied to Ruby on Rails and Rails seems to have peaked in 2007 and then spent 2008 going nowhere, I would guess that 2009 will see rails and prototype lose further ground.
Apple - iPod shuffle - VoiceOver. Multiple playlists. 4GB.
Apple isn’t afraid to be breathless in their marketing.
Mechanical Turk only has $600k a month worth of jobs - I don’t understand why it’s not 10 times more.
It’s interesting how some companies prosper during a recession - people cutting back means that companies that help save people money do well.
McDonald’s here in China has stopped offering their neverending stream of new items in favor of slashing already low prices across the board: a standard combo meal is down from around 3 bucks to around 2 bucks.
