High Order Blog

Twitbit 2.7 has been approved by Apple and is available on the App Store. We’ve seen approval times get significantly better since our 2.3 release in December 2009. Twitbit 2.7 was approved on the same day it was submitted, the second time that’s happened this year. Kudos to Apple for responding to developer complaints about excessive wait times.

Now to the details of what’s new in 2.7:

• Added customizable font sizes.
• Load links to tweets directly in Twitbit, rather than opening the embedded browser.
• Display an icon on the timeline next to tweets that link to photos.
• Fixed a bug where the user’s avatar would not update after it was changed on twitter.com.
• Fixed a bug where the PIN number no longer populates automatically when adding an account.
• Other minor bug fixes and UI enhancements.

Download it now!

All our code is belong to you. That’s right, starting today we’re making the source code for three of our four projects publicly available. Those projects are Build Watch, Code Watch and Bug Watch (never released) and are meant to comprise a nice little suite of development utilities for the iPhone. You can find the code for those projects and others on our GitHub page.  In case you’re unfamiliar with these projects, here’s a little information on each:

Bug Watch is a Lighthouse client for the iPhone and iPod touch. (Lighthouse is our preferred issue tracking system.) We were close to releasing this app some time ago when we got distracted by writing a Twitter push notification server. We planned to come back and finish it when we found some time. Still waiting for that to happen. Here’s a screenshot:

Code Watch is a GitHub iPhone app. This app was available on the iPhone App Store as a free download called ‘Code Watch Open Source’ and as a paid version that provided access to private repos, just called ‘Code Watch’. For now, we’ve dropped the lite version and made the ‘pro’ version a free download.

Build Watch, High Order Bit’s first project, is a simple client for various continuous integration servers (CruiseControl and Hudson). There are many types of continuous integration servers and even more customized configurations. We hope opening up the source code will allow people to implement support for their setup with minimal effort while being able to leverage the full range of Build Watch features.

All of these projects are licensed under the MIT License, which basically means you can do whatever you want with the code. Unfortunately, we don’t anticipate having a ton of time to further contribute to these projects, so we’re hoping they’ll attract some new developers. If that’s you, we’d love to hear from you and answer any questions you might have.

Last week we launched a major upgrade to our push notification server. We had added some tweaks and minor enhancements to our server previously, but otherwise, the code was pretty similar to our original proof-of-concept.  And that implementation held up pretty well for us — until recently. Our aim was to consistently poll Twitter for updates every 3 minutes which meant push notifications were delayed roughly a minute and a half on average. When everything was running smoothly, we were able to do just that, but we struggled with consistency.

Those days are behind us. With some thoughtful improvements, our early tests indicate that our push server is now more than 13 times more efficient than the previous version. And, there are still more optimizations we can make. Additionally, while our push server hardware is respectable, there’s a lot of room to upgrade.

The performance improvements aren’t the whole story, however. Twitter is doing its part to make timely notifications possible. As much as computing resources are a consideration for determining a polling frequency, so is Twitter’s quota on updates for 3rd party applications. When we started development on Twitbit that quota was 100 updates per hour. If we query your account for both DMs and mentions, that’s 100 updates per hour / 2 updates per query / 60 min. per hour = 1 query every minute and 12 seconds. And of course we didn’t want to consume your entire quota just to support notifications. Today, Twitter allows 350 updates per hour and they’ve announced that the limit will eventually be 1500! That means Twitter quotas are becoming less relevant and we can start to query for updates as often as our computing resources will allow.

Bottom line?

Reliability: Our server has been cruising without so much as a hiccup since the upgrade.

Promptness: Messages are currently being delivered in less than a minute and are taking mere seconds on average.

We don’t want to make any promises yet, but suffice it to say that we’re still in the process of pushing the delay time down — not letting it creep back up. Look for even more improvements in the coming days. Don’t take our word for it either, test it out and let us know what kind of delays you’re seeing. Send your results to @twitbitapp. We appreciate your patience while we worked through this growing pain. Thanks!

Today Apple approved Twitbit 2.6. It includes these changes:

• When adding users to contacts, the Twitter field now opens the user directly in Twitbit when tapped.
• A brief sound is now played when posting a tweet.
• Fixed a crash when either the user’s timeline, mentions, or search results are empty.
• Fixed a bug where the “highlight new” setting was not working correctly.

You can read more about it on our release notes page.

Get it from the App Store now!