TweetSpace
sam.birch, January 14th, 2010
It’s amazing how a simple ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if…’ statement shared with a collegue and a little bit of time can turn into a cool little app. That is the case with our latest little project: TweetSpace.
The idea was simple, being able to view your timeline in a 3D environment. The implementation of it not so! We started writting it in flash using AS2 as that is what we are most comfortable with. We thought that we could simply use the rss feed from our twitter homepage as our datasource and a 3D component that we’ve used before for the environment in flash.
As it turned out you need to authenticate in order to read that rss feed, so that meant we needed to look at the twitter Oauth API. Decided on a PHP implementation of Oauth as i don’t know .NET and it’s easier for me to get it up and working in PHP rather than appeal to the good nature of our programmers for someone to get it working in .NET, and then continually get hassled by me for ongoing tweaks that are inevitable on a project like this.
Anyway… we got that working and then when we thought we were close with just a few bugs to iron out, discovered that they were due to this 3rd party component that we couldn’t do anything about! Apart from rewrite the whole app in AS3. Which we did!
It was a good excuse to get into AS3 more and a chance to play with the native 3D features in Flash CS4. In the end it was fairly straight forward, only hurrdles really were learning the AS3 syntax.
So here it is, TweetSpace!
How do you use it?
Easily! (hopefully) – It’ll send you off to twitter to login, then we you come back and the app loads, you’ll see your timeline of all the tweets from the people you follow. Use the arrow keys to move forwards and backwards through the tweets, click on one to lift it from the stack and see any previous tweets from that user. (limited to the last week)
Leave it idol for about 10 seconds and it will try and get any new tweets and take you to the most recent tweet. You also have the ability to enter a search term and see those results in a 3D timeline.
Enjoy!
Feeling free to leave comments, or any feature requests.
This mandogroup labs project was brought to you by Samuel Birch (@samuelbirch) and Jim Savage (@jim_savage) and the letter T.
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