February 2010
1 post
January 2010
2 posts
Indie Relief
Birdfeed is participating in Indie Relief, a great project Justin Williams and Garrett Murray put together to raise money for the Haiti earthquake relief efforts. All sales for participating applications on January 20, 2010 will be donated to a charity doing work in Haiti (in Birdfeed’s case, Doctors Without Borders). There are a lot of fantastic developers participating, so this is a...
November 2009
2 posts
Birdfeed 1.2
Birdfeed 1.2 was just approved for sale, which means it should be showing up on the App Store and as an update on your iPhone within a few hours. I’m very proud of this release, since it contains a few features that have long been at the top of my Twitter client most wanted list, and one that I hope will play a small part in an exciting new direction for Twitter. Because Neven and I spent...
October 2009
1 post
onethinline:
But much of the joy of using Birdfeed is its use of a design principle called progressive disclosure, an elusive but powerful property whereby an application presents only what is needed as it’s needed, gracefully exposing more features and complexity only when the user seeks them out. In other words, the power is there, but it sticks to doing its job, not getting in your way.
...
September 2009
1 post
merlin:
For a lesson in keeping an app powerful but super-easy (and Mac-like) to use, look at Birdfeed, Buzz and Neven’s Twitter app for iPhone. I mean really look at Birdfeed. If you weren’t the type to fiddle around, looking for power user bits, you might never realize how much you can do with this easy-to-use app. And if you’re not that type, you probably never need to, right? So they built...
August 2009
4 posts
Birdfeed 1.1 Change Log
As I indicated on Twitter, Birdfeed 1.1 was primarily intended as a bug fix release. In time honored Apple fashion, I worked very hard in the month after Birdfeed’s release to smooth out the rough edges every software developer has to accept to ship a 1.0. Consequently, 1.1 is heavy on Snow Leopard-style “refinements” and light on out-and-out marquee features. Still, I think...
3 tags
The Birdfeed URL Scheme
Birdfeed 1.1 was approved by Apple yesterday, which means a tour of what’s new is in order. First off, I’d like to talk a bit about what is, to me, one of the most interesting features of 1.1: the new x-birdfeed:// URL scheme.
For most users, the URL scheme will be of interest primarily because of two other features it makes possible: a bookmarklet for posting shortened links from...
July 2009
5 posts
Birdfeed Bug: Restores from Backup
It has recently come to our attention that users are seeing crashes after installing Birdfeed on a new phone using an iTunes backup from an old phone. For users experiencing this problem, Birdfeed will start up at the Accounts screen and crash when the user taps an account to log into it.
This problem is rooted in a quirk of the iPhone Keychain we were, sadly, unaware of: a backed-up keychain...
Account Amnesia Redux
Unfortunately, it appears that for some subset of its victims, the dreaded “Account Amnesia” problem is not entirely solved by Birdfeed 1.0.1. Though we tested our fix on a variety of different permutations of the problem, it appears we may have missed a persistent crash that can occur if your Birdfeed account credentials in the iPhone Keychain are already in a particular inconsistent...
Birdfeed 1.0.1 Approved
We weren’t sure what to expect for our first update, but once again, the App Store approval process has moved along efficiently and uneventfully in approving Birdfeed 1.0.1. Thanks Apple!
This update is very small, and has only three changes:
A fix for the dreaded 1.0 “Account Amnesia” issue.
A fix for the missing “@” before the username on a retweet.
The...
Birdfeed 1.0.1 Submitted
Just a quick note to mention that we submitted Birdfeed 1.0.1 to Apple last night. This release is quite minimal, and is mainly focused on solving the dreaded “Account Amnesia” problem. One of the most frustrating things about iPhone development is, of course, that, thanks to Apple’s approval process, we have no way of knowing when this fix will see the light of day. While...
June 2009
4 posts
Birdfeed Bug: Account Amnesia
As many people have pointed out by now, there is a bug in Birdfeed 1.0’s multiple accounts support. If the username you specified when signing up for Twitter has uppercase letters in it (e.g. “BirdFeedUser”), Birdfeed will consistently forget that account and require you to login again on relaunch. This is the result of a boneheaded coding error that unfortunately we...
3 tags
Introducing Birdfeed
It’s been a crazy 24 hours at Birdfeed HQ East (in Williamsburg, Brooklyn) and West (in Portland, Oregon). Yesterday, when we least expected it, as we enjoyed our respective lazy Sundays, the gods of the App Store saw fit to bestow their seal of approval upon the fruit of our many months of labor. Given the experiences of many iPhone devs, we were expecting a longer approval time. But...