Tristan O’Tierney | Mac Geek

This election was a markedly different one for me. I’ve been able to vote in two presidential elections now, this being my second. My disdain for the Bush administration stretches as far back as the infamous “hanging chad” incident in Florida that cost Gore the 2000 election, so it’s no surprise I voted for Kerry despite my rather indifference to him. I didn’t really volunteer any money or time to the campaign, and if someone had asked me to I’d likely say “nah.” This time though, I donated several times. It certainly helped that Obama’s donation process was very simple and straight forward. It also prided me greatly that Obama was not accepting donations from special interests at all, and only from individual Americans (of which the cap is a reasonable $2500 or so per person). This was the most honest, and honorable campaign I’ve ever seen. That this man was able win on merit alone, and not on disgusting political maneuvering like attack ads and pointlessly concocted scandals warms the cockles of my heart.

Not only did I donate my money, but my time writing Obama ‘08.app. I can’t thank everyone enough who was responsible for making it a reality. We worked tirelessly on an impossible deadline for an application that would have a 30 day shelf life. We did it though because this app going to go into the history books. I’m not trying to toot my own horn, there’s good reason for it. It marks the first time in a Presidential campaign that using the internet and technology effectively was necessary to win the election. Obama is the Kennedy of our generation, in terms of using the latest communication channels to reach the growing youth vote. Traditionally the internet, despite being around since the 1996 election, hadn’t been used a primary means of communication because the majority demographic of the average voter just wasn’t computer literate enough to find the latest candidate speech on YouTube (or wouldn’t necessarily think to). Hard to do it when YouTube didn’t even exist until recently, as well. Without the internet to motivate the young voters, who were undoubtably Obama’s most active volunteer group, he never would have been able to get such massive turnout numbers for this election. The iPhone app we made was a first, and with nearly 39,000 phone calls and 10,000 active callers it won’t be the last. I can already envision an army of get-out-the-vote volunteers canvassing neighborhoods and providing realtime information back to the campaign headquarters database. This will come in ‘12.

Why is a more streamlined canvassing system actually important? Let me give you a brief journal of my experience in Nevada on November 3rd, and 4th. I was part of the Drive for Change Obama volunteering effort to get out the vote in Nevada, a swing state right next to California. I’m often pessimistic — while I hope for the best, I do often assume the worst. How could a few volunteers make a difference? The truth is it’s all in the numbers. While one or two can’t, if everyone felt that way we’d never have gotten such a large brigade of supporters canvassing the neighborhoods of Las Vegas county. The other side of this equation is that sadly, only 64% of registered voters turned out to vote in this historic election. Despite that, it was the highest voter turnout in nearly 100 years. It turns out that the most difficult thing about getting a candidate elected isn’t getting the voters on your side, it’s just getting them to the polls! Without an army of efficient canvassers to knock on every door and get them out of their houses and to the polls, there’s simply no way we could have pulled off the crushing victory in Nevada we achieved. I truly believe this now, and I’m ecstatic to think of what we’ll do next election with a technologically superior canvassing system using an iPhone that knows where you are (CoreLocation FTW) and push notifications from HQ to command an army of mobile volunteers that can be redeployed in neighborhoods instantly.

Why all this hub-bub though? Why is all of my time, passion, and money worth it for this one man? The truth is Obama will not, and cannot, fix all the problems in this country. The power of a president is his ability to not only make good decisions, but to build a team of people who can carry out his vision. Without respect, a leader is powerless. If no one believes in you, how can they follow you? Obama’s proved he can be respected as a leader. This is true political capital that he’ll be able to cash in with the best and brightest administration this country’s seen in 100 years. And we need it, because trying the same thing over and over while expecting different results is the mark of insanity. This is why I voted for Obama, and why I believe this is a major inflection point for our country. Here’s hoping. Here’s hoping the next 8 years will be filled with optimism that we will start fixing a lot of the problems that are effecting our country and our world. Here’s hoping that the collectivism of the most inclusive leader we’ve seen can bring everyone together to achieve it.

For awhile this was a post I didn’t want to write out of fear. Fear because of people like Craig Hockenberry who’ve received nasty-grams from Apple for crossing the *******NDA line. Fear from my experience at working at Apple, and knowing what speaking out against them can do for you in the long run. However, I feel ethics are my foundation. If I don’t stand up for what I believe in, how can I respect myself?

My position on the AppStore rejections was simple: What Apple’s doing isn’t the greatest, but like almost always don’t attribute to malice what is more likely explained by ignorance. Apple is a hectic place, I know, I’ve worked there. More often than not, your favorite missing feature or most annoying bug is not some ulterior motive to kill babies and kick puppies. They probably just didn’t get the time. So, when I saw what was going on with these rejections I figured the reason was simple: The perfect policy hadn’t been put in place yet. Not because Apple’s “Evil” but because they just hadn’t formally established criteria for inclusion into the store well enough yet.

That was until rejection letters became NDA. To call this action anything less than the exact opposite of a benevolent response would be an understatement. This is at the point that I expect a response from the Steve himself relatively shortly on all the bad publicity it’s generating. Now mind you, I’m not writing this as an attack on a company I hate, but out of love for a company I feel so utterly passionate for that I can’t stand by and let it ruin the opportunity to change humanity forever over what I ultimately feel is just a lack of formal policy.

The simple truth is the current policy cannot stand, and we (third party devs) await a response as soon as possible. We know how hectic it can be there, but we can’t wait forever. To all my friends at Apple: we know you’re probably annoyed by all this nagging. We just want things to change for the better, and we think you agree too.

It’s unfortunate I don’t have the time to blog more regularly, call it workaholic syndrome if you will. This Monday was my last day at Tapulous, and I wish them the best of luck. I came to the company because I shared a similar passion with Mike Lee, that quality matters and that writing beautiful software really can change the world. In the end, Mike and Tapulous couldn’t see eye to eye and the leadership that Mike brought to this platform-specific company I feel is no longer there.

This leads me to what’s next: United Lemur. For the time being, I’m working on an amazing project (that also happens to be very secret) and I hope to tell you more about that when the time comes. Until then, look forward to Mike’s announcement on October 9th.

It’s been a long while since I last updated my blog, but for good reason. I’ve been hard at work on the next generation of software, also known as iPhone. My first project that I get to show all of you is Twinkle, available on the app store. The launch has been delayed for awhile, but it has gone pretty well overall. We have an amazing amount of users for only 2 or 3 days of being available, but the ride isn’t quite over yet. There are some hiccups, a few in particular, so I’d like to talk about them.

Why do you need a Tapulous account to use Twinkle, and what exactly is it.?

Well, the reason is we’re building a network, and using Twitter as the first of many gateways. Many people have heard of or know this concept as “friendfeed.” We’re shooting for nothing less, and are planning for the future by supporting multiple accounts. We want to do certain things that friendfeed isn’t capable of, like hosting pictures for our Twinkle Shots, or embedding location information into tweets like we do for our Nearby tab. Neither of these features would be possible or anywhere near as seamless had we not made the decision to build our own network, with Twitter as the first service.

What we don’t want to do however is pick favorites. This means that even if some other service (if one exists) supported image attachments AND locationing, it still doesn’t have the number and activity of users from Twitter. So, we went where the users are with Twitter as our first network.

What many people want is just a Twitter client, and I’m sorry to say as a basic design decision, that’s just not what Twinkle is or is meant to be. You’re welcome to use it as a dedicated Twitter client and we’re trying really hard to make it a first class client for nothing but. We aren’t there yet, and I’m happy to see all the suggestions and feedback pour in. I’d like to address a rather common one which is: Why can’t you disable the Tapulous “stuff”? Well, we didn’t get time to do that! It’s definitely a popular request, and we need to consider how that will impact the application for one very important reason: Twinkle’s Nearby view depends on Tapulous network integration. If everyone just decided to turn off the “Tapulous account” features, no one would see a thing in Nearby! I think what a better solution might be is to simply have all twitter information (avatars, user names, pretty names, etc) take priority over the Tapulous network information, should you choose to do so. We believe this is an ideal solution but one that takes time unfortunately. Consider now we’ve heard everyone’s complaints, and we will address them in due time.

What do you do with my messages after you send them? Are they on your servers too?

The answer is yes, they are. In order to host nearby messages, and for features like our automatic tweet queuing while Twitter is down, we need to store your messages on our server too. The caveat to this is we need to support Twitter’s private profiles, which we do not yet. This is a known and unfortunately overlooked issue.

What about feature X, Y, Z?

We’ve taken a look at the most requested features, and we’ve already planned on implementing of few of them. Built in web browser. This one’s a highly requested, and particularly useful feature on a mobile app where bouncing between two applications is a painful process. Clickable @replies. This feature was actually in the client for awhile, but just didn’t make the cut due to time so we had to take it out. The notification sounds are too jarring/loud. This was a large complaint, which we’ll remedy.

Not all of this may make it into the next release, but this is just a few of the things we’re working on.

This post was inspired by a recent twitter that I thought I might elaborate on a bit more. One of the nice new features of Objective-C 2.0 is dot-syntax for read/write proprerties. For example:

Person *person = [[Person alloc] init];
person.mobileNumber = @"1-555-123-1234";

This is uber nifty, and can save you a load of time and redundant code. However it’s often the case that I want to hide access to certain private member variables, but still expose accessors/mutators to attributes on those private variables. Let’s say mobileNumber is actually an accessor/mutator on a sub-object, let’s call it PhoneBook. Under the hood, this is implemented like so:

@interface Person {
    PhoneBook *phoneBook;
}

@property (nonatomic, rertain) NSString *mobileNumber;
@end

@implementation Person
- (void)setMobileNumber:(NSString *)number {
    phoneBook.mobileNumber = number;
}

- (NSString *)mobileNumber {
    return phoneBook.mobileNumber;
}
@end

This seems far from ideal, when really I just want to pass through the implementation of this accessor/mutator to one of my instance variables. A more clean and hypothetical implementation could look like this:

@interface Person {
    PhoneBook *phoneBook;
}

@property (nonatomic, retain) NSString *mobileNumber;
@end

@implementation Person
@synthesize mobileNumber=phoneNumber.mobileNumber;
@end

Well, something I had suspected and maybe secretly known for awhile was in the works landed yesterday! Flickr Video! This is a natural feature addition to FlickrBooth that I’ll eventually be supporting. I don’t have much time these days and lets face it, FlickrBooth being free isn’t much of a cashcow. Is this feature something people really want? Put your money where your mouth is and donate! I’m not saying I won’t do this without donations or that I’m holding my FlickrBooth users hostage, but I certainly up the priority of work based on the interest of my users. I’d be interested to hear what sort of feature(s) surrounding the new addition you guys would like. Should uploading videos allow going to YouTube and Flickr at the same time? What if the video is over 90 seconds, should I clip at 90 seconds or split it into X number of videos? (The latter might actually be pretty tricky…). As an aside, I’ve also tossed around the idea of FlickrBooth for the iPhone, especially with some big names asking for it.

Hot on the heels of my recent ObjectiveYouTube release, I bring you two for one! ObjectiveYouTube 0.2 for developers and FlickrBooth 2.0 for users. As you can probably guess, the big new feature for this release is YouTube uploading of videos. YouTube videos are big, and take awhile to upload? No problem! I’ve also added a handy little upload progress window to view the status of your YouTube uploads as well as the ability to cancel them should you change your mind :). To top it all off, FlickrBooth now automatically checks for updates. Head on over to the download page and give it a spin.

So I had time tonight to package what I’ve got working, and would like to get some more eyeballs looking at it. Please check it out! Download available at Google Code.

So after going through all the trouble of writing a generic multipart form generator, and screen scraping youtube, etc I’ve completely rewritten it to use the new spiffy YouTube write apis that came out literally a day after I completed all that prior work. Oh well, the good news is this library will be shielded from things like YouTube updating their website since I no longer have to screen scrape. So the downsides are the lib will only handle authentication and uploading, mostly because those are all I need right now. I may let the community fix that problem if anyone else needs that functionality. Look out for a post in the next couple days while I finish up the readme/licensing.

Broken iPhone
Originally uploaded by tristanotierney

So awhile back (just after macworld) Quynh’s iPhone mysteriously cracked. We didn’t drop it, we didn’t step on it, it just spiderwebbed in the corner for no apparent reason. Needless to say we were hesitant to take it to an Apple genius because anything involving what appears to be user-inflicted-damage is shrugged off. Well, we were browsing the mall today and said screw it lets give it a try. 20 minutes later we were blessed with a brand spanking new phone! I had a similar experience with Ikea, in which we actually brought in an photo of a broken drawer shelf (on our iPhones of course) and they didn’t even ask questions! They just went into the back room and gave us the new board we needed to repair the drawer. Not to go off into too much of a tangent, but I think these two companies share a lot in common.