I posted a question to Twitter last week wondering if anyone knew of a site that would tell me how many tweets I post a day on average. Within minutes Andy Matthews (his site, his Twitter) recommended TweetStats. It took about 20 minutes for TweetStats to churn through my nearly 5,000 tweets and produce a graphical analysis of my activity. Since May of 2007 I've posted an average of 8.7 tweets a day, a number that seems kind of low to me. Perhaps more interesting than that are my lowest month of tweets - 55 in May 2007 and my highest month - 483 in May 2008.

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If you follow my twitter feed you may have seen a tweet I posted this week about getting a trademark violation e-mail from Adobe. I brought this on myself as I submitted twitterAIR to the new AIR Marketplace. Shortly after submitting it the senior product manager for the AIR marketplace e-mailed me the violation note.

So, twitterAIR needs to be renamed and I'm fine with it as I have no attachment to the name. In fact, I'm horrible with creating product names hence the original really sucky one. I decided yesterday to run a contest to see who submits the best replacement name. To give you some context I am defining "best" as the most original, catchy, interesting, easy to remember name that still keeps a correlation (somehow) with the Twitter service. Whomever submits the name I choose will receive some goodies via snail mail. I'm currently thinking of sending the Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers pocket guide, some t-shirts, and perhaps a few other things I come up with. Feel free to submit your ideas in the comments below or e-mail them to me directly - trajik210 at gmail.

The deadline for submissions is next week, Wednesday May 28.

I was recently interviewed by Dan Wilson, a zone leader at DZone, about Flex, AIR, and the twitterAIR application I created. The interview has been published and you can read it or vote on it using the links below.

Read the article:
http://ria.dzone.com/articles/meet-man-who-set-twitter

Vote it up:
http://www.dzone.com/links/the_man_who_set_twitter_free.html

twitterAIR has been updated for AIR 1.0 skipping right over AIR Beta 3. Not much has changed in the new version though. I squashed a few bugs, got rid of the zip file download (which means I can't track downloads anymore) and implemented a seamless badge install.

If you don't have the latest AIR runtime (1.0) on your machine, the twitterAIR installation will install the runtime for you. If you're running an older version of twitterAIR, just use the badge install to update your copy.

For more on the announcement of Flex 3 and AIR 1, click here.

Get twitterAIR here!

With Adobe announcing the next beta release of the Adobe Integrated Runtime, it's only right that I offer an updated version of my twitterAIR application. Don't go getting too excited though. Version 1.1.3 has no additional features or bug fixes, it's simply a maintenance release recompiled - with a few required changes - to work on the new version of AIR.

Download twitterAIR v1.1.3 (requires AIR Beta 2)

I've made some minor updates and fixed some annoying bugs in twitterAIR. The new version, 1.1.2, is available here or by clicking the "twitterAIR" link in the downloads pod to the right. Users with twitterAIR already installed will be prompted to update on the next app restart.

Here's what has changed:

• Fixed a bug where clicking any link in a tweet would cause tweets to randomly lose their text. As you scrolled up and down - with the scrollbar arrows or the scrollbar track - tweet text would be missing from different and seemingly random messages. As you continued scrolling, tweet text would be appear and disappear randomly. In order to resolve this I had to switch from my custom HTMLText component to the built-in Text component and dump the rollover affect on links.
• Fixed a bug where clicking the Twitter user links (http://twitter.com/[username]) in each tweet would open up two browser windows.
• Fixed a bug where the error pop-up window would be created more than once if several errors occurred before the original error window was closed. When this happened there was no way to get all the error windows closed.
• Added support for displaying the app name in the "from" text in the tweets displayed on twitter.com. This was accomplished by working with the folks at Twitter to set up the super secret (not really) handshake between the app and their servers. Thanks to Alex at Twitter for taking care of this!!
• Added tooltip styling to areas of the tweet messages.

I've updated twitterAIR - my AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) / Twitter application - with some new features. Thanks to those of you who have submitted comments and suggestions. Below is an excerpt of the changelog illustrating the new features. You can get the new version by pressing the appropriate link in the Downloads pod to the right, or by clicking here.

• Added minimize button.
• Switched the twitterAIR and trajiklyhip.com logo positions.
• Added support for typing "@username" in the input box. If you begin a tweet with @username, the typed username will be matched against your friends list.
• Added support for sending direct messages with "d username message."
• Added support for viewing direct messages. Press the DIRECT button to view your messages.
• Added hyperlink support for the twitter.com/username links in the top right of each tweet. Clicking the text will now load the user's twitter page.
• Added support for the @username callouts and URL's. Any @username text and hyperlink (http://, https://, or www) can now be clicked.
• Separated the e-mail and blog parts of the feedback text (in the Settings window) so my e-mail address can be copied/pasted while my blog URL can still be clicked.
• Added support for version tracking. When new versions of the app are released you will be prompted to update.

A co-worker informed me twitterAIR is now on AIRapps.net. You can check out the other 47 applications by visiting the Web site.

Here are a few screen shots of twitterAIR so folks can see what some of the windows look like before downloading and installing the app. The images are a little bit smaller than the actual size of the app.

Friends view (public view looks the same):

Settings view:

Error view:

Several weeks ago I became hooked on Twitter and the ability to keep up with what my friends are doing. Since then I spent some time building an Apollo application that integrated with the Twitter services. Shortly after that Adobe announced AIR and I scrapped what I was working on and started over. My goal was to not only build something that worked with Twitter but to use some key development aspects of Flex 3 and AIR. Along the way I hoped to learn more about Flex development.

Today I'm making the application (twitterAIR) available for the general public to try in the hopes of getting comments and suggestions. I'd like for twitterAIR to become an application people enjoy using on a daily basis but in order for that to happen I need to know what works well, what doesn't, and what features folks would like to see.

So, if you use Twitter and you'd like to try twitterAIR on Mac or Windows you can download it via the Downloads pod to the right or using this link:

Download twitterAIR!

If you're interested you can also read about some of the features of Flex/AIR development I used to put the application together. Just click the "more" link below.

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