Dean J. Robinson, the developer behind what is easily the best iPhone web application for Twitter, recently gave us a glimpse of what we should expect from the next version of Hahlo. He lists ten things we should know about the next version – and here are three that I’m really looking forward to.
- Better profile support. For some reason it seemed as the though the only part of Hahlo 3 that was either ignored or never throughly developed was the individual profile pages. Now with support for viewing the archive, favorites, and profile information it seems like Hahlo 4 will solve that.
- OAuth support. I trust Dean. I’ve used Hahlo for a very long time. But having an extra layer of protection against Dean, or any other developer, getting my Twitter credentials makes me a very happy man.
- Browser back/forward buttons working properly. This is something that sets apart the good iPhone web applications from the great ones. Flickr’s iPhone-friendly mobile site does this perfectly – and I’m looking forward to Hahlo now handling browser history properly too.
All of the things that Dean listed in his post are, of course, exciting updates to an already great application. The reason I’m looking forward to the above three the most is because I feel that Hahlo 3 was sorely lacking (whether by its own fault or Twitter’s) them.
Source: 10 things you should know about Hahlo 4.
Site: Hahlo.com
3 Comments
Thanks for linkage Colin.
For the profiles, most of what is in H4 is already in H3.1 but I’ve organised it better this time around. There a couple of neat things like a location or @username search directly from someones profile both which I’ve found myself using a lot during testing
I’m looking forward to getting OAuth working, my first couple of attempts have failed miserably, but I’ve got a full weekend ahead to work something out. Documentation, or lack of, is an issue at the moment.
The back/forward stuff is working great already (another reason I’m glad I’ve switch from my crappy custom js to jQuery), its got a few small hiccups, but they should be sorted before release.
Dean: A few thoughts. First, Oauth documentation from Twitter is scarce? Shouldn’t it just follow the standard conventions? Also… switching to jQuery from your homegrown JS might be good because of the quality of your JS (no offense) but I did see that the guy that worked on Flickr’s iPhone web app said he recommended homegrown because you can keep them lean. Any thoughts there?
The documentation thing is really more in relation to using oauth in general, I’ve found several php libraries which I could use, but I’m not finding them particularly helpful. I think its just case of I need to do more searching and reading. It’ll probably all click into place at 3am right when I about to go to bed.
As for the JS, Hahlo’s current scripts are based off the Joe Hewitt’s early iUI scripts, which I pulled apart and then put back together. They’ve simply gotten to a point where they are impossible to maintain or update (totally my own fault). jQuery might end up a little bit heavier but it shouldn’t affect it much, afterall its only loaded once.