Several clients (‘official’ Twitter app and Plume) successfully capture ACTION_VIEW intents for any twitter.com URL and will display the tweet as desired. Other clients capture various other intents but don’t appear capable of opening a specific tweet via an intent. In some cases there are other undocumented intents that will allow a user profile to be opened via an intent – this is what WristTweets falls back on for clients that can’t directly open a tweet via an intent.

Since others may find this useful, shared below are the intents I discovered for Tweetdeck, Plume, Seesmic, Hootsuite, Twidroid Pro / Ubersocial, and the ‘official’ Twitter app. As far as I know none of these are officially documented, and they obviously may change without notice in future updates.

Twitter client intent filters (how I found them)

To figure out which intents various Twitter clients could accept, I used Package Explorer and the Android Intent Playground.

I hadn’t found the these iSEC Partners tools at the time, but the Manifest Explorer and Package Play apps look like they would also do the job.

When starting an activity with the Intent.ACTION_VIEW intent and a http://twitter.com/{username}/status/{nnnnn} style URL for a tweet as data:

• official Twitter app
• Plume
  appears in app selection popup and opens these tweets as expected.

• Hootsuite
• Twidroid Pro
  appears in app selection popup, but fails to open or opens with an error

• TweetDeck
• Seesmic
  doesn’t even appear in the app selection popup, indicating it doesn’t capture ACTION_VIEW intents containing a twitter.com url.

TweetDeck has intent filters for:

• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like tweetdeck://at/username which opens a user profile.
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like tweetdeck://tag/some_tag which opens a column with #some_tag as the hashtag.
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like tweetdeck://tweetdeck.com which just opens tweetdeck.
• Intent.ACTION_SEND for text/plain and image/* mime types

Twidroid Pro has intent filters for:

• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like twidroid://message/bla
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like twitter://send/bla
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like twitter://com.twidroidpro.twidroidprofile/username
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like http://com.twidroid.list/list
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like twitter://com.twidroidpro.twittersearch/query
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW to catch various URLs for third-party Twitter services (eg Twitlonger, Twitpic etc)
• Intent.ACTION_SEND for text/plain, text/twitter, application/twitter, image/png, image/jpeg and video/* mime types

Hootsuite uses the custom URI scheme x-hoot-full:// and has intent filters for:

• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like x-hoot-full://profile-twitter/username
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like x-hoot-full://search/query
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like x-hoot-full://list/list_name
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like x-hoot-full://web/http://some.url.com
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like x-hoot-full://profile-facebook/some_id
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like twitter://not_sure_what_this_part_is
• Intent.ACTION_SEND for text/plain, application/twitter and image/* mime types
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW to catch twitter.com urls

The Official Twitter app has very few useful intent filters. They are:

• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like http://twitter.com/ and http://mobile.twitter.com/ . Curiously, I can’t find these in the AndroidManifest.xml data output by PackageExplorer, but they work in testing.
• According to PackageExplorer, the app has Intent.ACTION_VIEW intent filters for urls containing http://mobile.twitter.com/sessions/client/main and http://mobile.twitter.com/sessions/client .. in my testing that app doesn’t seem to intercept these intents.
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls at host com.android.contacts with mimetype vnd.android.cursor.item/vnd.twitter.profile .. untested .. might be useful for accessing a Twitter profile associated with the phones contacts.
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for the scheme twitter-android-app:// which appears to for OAuth based login for that app only. Not useful for much.
• Intent.ACTION_SEND for text/plain and image/* mime types

Enjoy !

Related posts:

1. Wrist Tweets – a Twitter notifier for the Sony LiveView

I ain't getting on no plane, Hannibal!

Unfortunately, it’s been hard for new pics to get to the top of the rankings. This is probably because of the changes to scoring a while back, and what I would call an ‘early adopter advantage’. As a result the rankings really haven’t moved much over the last year or so … until now.

Today, I’m shaking things up just a little. The front “Rankings” page will now show only pics submitted within the last year – as a result there should be more movement as dominant pics get old and younger successful pics get a shot at glory. The best pics of all time will still be shown under the ‘all time’ rankings. There are also now “Most successful dead pics of all time” and  ”Most successful living pics of all time” so you can see the best of the best that are still battling it out, even after a year.

So, don’t be shocked if next time you check out the rankings Mr. T is no longer on the front page. He’s had a good run .. it’s time for him to step aside and let the younger pics steal the limelight.

No related posts.

Apologies: GrandMasterPixel iswas temporarily offline while the domain name (along with four others) iswas transferred off GoDaddy to another registrar. All going to plan, it should be back up in a few hours. The transition was mostly painless (once I figured out how to deal with the new registrars zone files).

I’ve been dissatisfied with GoDaddy for a few years now – I particularly dislike their horrible user interface which is actively designed to trick or confuse you into buying some extra service you probably don’t want. The last straw that prompted me to change was their support of the SOPA internet censorship bill, a proposal currently working it’s way through the US Congress which would have wide ranging implications for internet freedom as we know it. Oh, that and the fact that Bob Parsons shoots elephants.

So, sorry about the downtime, but it’s “for a good cause”.

No related posts.

http://gamedeveloper.texterity.com/gamedeveloper/fall2011cg#pg39

No related posts.

It comes with a bunch of handy default notification plugins: text messages, missed calls, calendar notifications, Facebook status update notifications, RSS feeds etc. There is also a Twitter plugin provided by Sony, but I felt it was a little substandard and didn’t really meet my needs. So, I decided to write Wrist Tweets – my own personal version of what the stock LiveView Twitter plugin should have been.

Wrist Tweet supports:

• Timeline notifications
• Mention/@reply notifications
• Direct message notifications
• Opening the first URL in a tweet on your phone
• Authentication via OAuth – no locally stored password
• A choice of sensible update frequencies, from 1 minute up to 6 hours
• Notifications of tweets on a Twitter “list”

For me, that last one, support for a following a Twitter list, is the killer feature. It allows me to make a custom Twitter list with any accounts that I really want to get important notifications from, and receive a timely buzz on my watch when they update.

The LiveView is a great concept, but sadly it’s a buggy product. Sony has released a firmware update for the microdisplay device, and an update of the LiveView Manager software for Android, but in my hands neither of these fixed the persistent loss-of-connection problems when paired with my Dell Streak. The claim it works just fine with Sony Xperia phones, but I’m skeptical. Wrist Tweets endeavors to combat some of these shortcomings by (optionally) checking Twitter for updates each time the LiveView is reconnected to your phone. This way, even if you miss a notification because the connection dropped out, after pressing the ‘action button’ to reconnect, the missed updates should come through. Also, if your network connection is down, Wrist Tweets will ignore the usual update frequency and keep trying to grab updates each minute until it can connect – this slightly aggressive polling should have little to no effect on bandwidth (after all, the network is down), but it will hopefully ensure you see important tweets as soon as the network becomes available.

One thing Wrist Tweets currently doesn’t support is multiple accounts, since it’s not something I really need myself at this stage. If there is demand, I’ll probably add it, but no promises. Despite this, I believe it’s probably this best Twitter plugin for LiveView out there at the moment … but hey, I’m biased

Wrist Tweets is available now on the Android Market for around US$2. So if two people buy it, it will get me a cup of coffee. Yay caffeine !

WristTweets was built using JTwitter, a sweet-ass LGPL licenced Twitter library for Java.

No related posts.

As I’ve mentioned, this is to do with the having a larger ‘live’ pic population than when the game first started. My simple simulations suggest that with the current live pic population of about ~2000 pics, and about ~1000 battles daily (which was the case a few weeks ago), only about 15 % of pics should be missing out on getting at least one battle per day. The numbers will be a little different now, but you get the idea. Nonetheless … judging just seems too slow, so changes are afoot.

Proposal

For the latest GrandMasterPixel update, I increased the judging token recharge to one token every 15 mins (4X faster) .. but since many people will then also submit 4X faster, this won’t really solve the slow judging issue. The big change I have planned next is to increase the number of hitpoints for new pics (from 10 to 100) and the submission cost (from 10 to 40 submission credits per pic). I’ll probably also make it so pics lose 2 HP per lost battle, to prevent the pic population growing too much. I haven’t settled on these numbers 100% yet, but if my spreadsheet shenanigans are correct, the result of all this should be a faster judging rate, with a similar submission rate (about a maximum of two pics per day).

For the math/game design nerds: The other advantage will be that since all the numbers in the game are larger, it should be easier to tweak things more subtly in the future without moving away from whole numbers (eg, the smallest possible tweak to submission cost currently is 10 %, a change of +/- 1 to the total value of 10. A higher overall submission cost will make smaller percentage changes possible). Going to larger numbers kind of goes against my initial philosophy of keeping the numbers small to make the game more approachable to casual players … but now I’m thinking that this was a false premise, and it won’t be an issue for the majority of existing (or prospective) players.

Side effects

My biggest issue with making these changes is how to best deal with existing pics. Some people would very rightly complain if brand new pics suddenly got 10x more HP, allowing them to easily acquire more wins than an ‘old-world pic’ – so I will probably scale up the hitpoints for all existing pics by 10x (and current wins/loses by 5x), to match what would be equivalent if they had been submitted under the new system. This is probably not quite perfect, but it will have to do. At the same time, achievement thresholds related to numbers of wins will have to be multiplies by 5. In the process I just need to be very very careful to not completely mess up the database somehow

Bonus braindump !

While I’m at it – here’s another idea of something the might help speed up the perceived judging rate. I could prioritize judging for active players, so that if someone hasn’t judged for one week, their pics get flagged as “inactive” and don’t get included in battles as frequently as pics of active players. This would reward you guys that play every day, without requiring any major ‘economic’ changes immediately.

No related posts.

‘Candle Light’ by NextTarget

Thanks to everyone who has stuck with GrandMasterPixel during this (extended) beta period, it’s been a fun and exciting time, watching all these cool little pics appear magically from ‘teh handheld Internets’. I’m aware that there is a problem with pics not getting battles very frequently at the moment … this is a result of the live pic population growing much larger over the past few months. My quick simulations suggest that with the current ‘live’ pic population of about ~2000 pics, and the current number of battles daily (~ 1000), only about 15 % of pics should be missing out on getting at least one battle per day … so if you submit a pic and it doesn’t get any wins/loses within about ~48 hours, you are just very unlucky (0.15*0.15 = about a 1 in 50 chance). Probability doesn’t discriminate, and the pseudorandom number generator on the server (Google App Engine) is quite fair

No related posts.

Jason (of http://textfiles.com fame) has put some real effort into getting some classic cover art on the DVD, and included a little “feelie” – a fairly weighty numbered coin (as was a common marketing tactic back in the days when Infocom sold boxed versions of it’s games). Here’s a few pics:

I haven’t watched all the content on the DVD yet, but many of the interviews contain little gems of experience on game design issues that early interactive fiction authors encountered, most of which also applies to graphical games as much as text-only games.

No related posts.

Anyhow, here’s a little link-o-rama with some views ….

sqorgar tweets:

No related posts.

Congratulations to “lava floe” by meant2live218 — lucky number 5000 !

No prizes, apart from the glory of being randomly featured here

This is obviously a topical pic, inspired by Eyjafjallajökull’s recent activity. But did any one else notice ? Volcano-related pics seemed to start mysteriously appearing in GrandMasterPixel long before the world media was banging on about Eyjafjallajökull erupting. Spooky – it’s almost like GrandMasterPixel players can predict the future. Only time will tell

No related posts.