Background

For sometime now Twitter has offered 3rd Party Clients two ways of authenticating your details against their system.

The first way is called xAuth which just requires you to enter your user name and password into the app and in return we do some magic in the background to exchange that for unique tokens which in turn logs you in, but the app doesn’t keep your password.

The second way is called OAuth. OAuth requires you to visit Twitter’s web site in a web browser, which shows you a list of permissions the app will have to your account and then you’ll be redirected back to your app.

Whilst xAuth is a much neater and elegant system we’ve never been happy with it as it still requires you entering your password to a client who you are simply trusting not to abuse it.

What’s Changing?

In Mid June, Twitter are going to now require apps that wish to have access to a user’s Direct Messages to firstly use the OAuth process only and secondly re-authenticate users.

How this affects Tweetings

With regards to requiring OAuth only, if you are using Tweetings for iPhone, iPad and Chrome then we don’t need to make any code changes at all as we already use OAuth authentication.

Tweetings for Mac does use xAuth and will require us to push an update to the Mac App Store before the mid-June deadline so that you can keep access to your Direct Messages.

The good news is that we are in final testing of migrating Tweetings for Mac from xAuth to OAuth and we should be good to go soon.

The second part of the changes is where you come in. Unfortunately because of the permission changes Twitter is making, they are requiring all apps that need Direct Message access to re-authenticate all users. We can’t do this ourselves.

This requires you to re-login all of your accounts between now and the mid-June deadline in order to keep your Direct Messages and Direct Message push notifications.

What happens if I don’t re-login?

From our understanding pretty much everything will work just fine EXCEPT you won’t be able to make use of Direct Messages until you do relogin.

How do I do this in Tweetings

Tweetings for iPhone and iPad

• If you have more than one account then this is pretty straight forward. Simply go to the accounts screen (by tapping your screen name at the top of the main timeline).
• Swipe to delete an account you aren’t currently logged into
• Tap ‘Add Account’ and re-log back into that same account
• Switch to that account and then do the same for the next account

If you only have one account you have two options

• You’ll either have to delete Tweetings and re-install it from the App Store. Don’t worry this is free because you’ve already purchased it before.
• You can alternatively create a temporary second account on Twitter so that you can delete your primary account without deleting the app.

Note: if you try to authenticate two accounts quickly after one another, when presented with the login page on Twitter’s website you may still be logged into the last account. Tap your icon at the top right of the screen and then logout.

Tweetings for Chrome

• Tap the logout X button at the top right of the popup window
• Then tap the Tweetings icon and re-login again

Tweetings for Mac

• Do not perform the delete/relogin process unless you have the forthcoming version 2.0.4 from the Mac App Store
• If you have 2.0.4 then go to the ‘Tweetings’ menu at the top left of the main menu bar
• Select ‘Accounts’
• Delete any accounts you wish to by selecting them and pressing the ‘-’ button
• Click the ‘+’ button and a window will open and authenticates you with Twitter over OAuth

tl;dr if you don’t re-log in to your accounts in Tweetings before mid-June you’ll loose access to Direct Messages and Direct Message push notifications

Update: Tweetings for Mac 2.0.4 is now available from the Mac App Store with oAuth authentication.

Update 2: Twitter’s cut off for moving to oAuth is now the end of June

This has previously been delivered by us regularly polling your accounts and notifying you of new mentions and direct messages. Because that polling is scheduled, we have lots of accounts to monitor and it all takes a lot of server resources, bandwidth and money we’ve always had a short delay on being able to deliver messages. Sometimes as short as 30 seconds, sometimes 5 mins or more (which is less than ideal).

Twitter offers a number of Streaming solutions, one of which is still a beta product, called Site Streams. So long as you have authorised Tweetings we can monitor your mentions and direct messages and send you a push notification the very instant they arrive!

This is a huge change to our service and one we hope you’ll love.

I’m not getting the push notifications?

If you are an existing user you’ll be migrated into the new system automatically the next time you download a new mention INSIDE Tweetings, that means you have to load Tweetings and check your mentions! Then once an hour we will know you’re registered for instant push and add you to the service.

If you are a new user, the first time you load Tweetings and download your tweets, you may have to wait up to an hour to get your first push notification. After that they will be instant.

However coming very soon to both Tweetings for iPhone and Tweetings HD for iPad, we are very pleased to announce the support of User Streams for BOTH these devices!

Pull down refresh is so 2010… 2011 is all about streams! This great feature will be available in Tweetings for iPhone v4.0 and Tweetings HD v3.0. Just connect to a WiFi network and the tweets start streaming. New tweets will show up instantly, no need to ever refresh again.

Your home timeline, mentions and direct messages will all automatically update so long as you are connected over WiFi. Don’t worry if you leave the house and/or your WiFi connection drops, we’ll simply disconnect from the stream automatically and you can carry on as usual so you don’t waste your cell data limits.

When?

Well both updates have already been submitted to Apple for approval, we’ve been testing it with a great team of beta testers who’ve been pulling it apart for the past few weeks and it should be with everyone else in a week or two!

How do I enable it?

By default Tweetings for iPhone and iPad will not have this enabled.  You can turn this on yourself in both apps by going to ‘Settings’ (in Tweetings for iPhone this is under the ‘More’ button at the bottom of the screen), then scroll to the second titled ‘Display’, then tap ‘Advanced’ and then turn on ‘Streaming over WiFi’.

You’ll then need to restart Tweetings, this means tapping the home button to go back to the Springboard, Double Tap the Home button to get to the multitasking tray, tap and hold the Tweetings icon until the icons shake, tap the red close icon.  Load Tweetings as normal.

What is Tweetings Sync?

Simply put, Tweetings Sync, when enabled automatically keeps unread tweets on your main timelines in sync between any platform or device you have Tweetings installed on.  From iPhone to iPad to Chrome to Mac, you never have to read the same tweet twice!

What Devices is Tweetings Sync Available On?

Tweetings Sync is available on the following platforms and versions

• iPhone version 3.6.3 and higher
• iPad version 2.6.4 and higher
• Mac version 1.1.0 and higher
• Google Chrome Extension version 1.6.0.5 and higher

How do I enable it?

Tweetings Sync is not automatically enabled. If you don’t need it or don’t use Tweetings on more than one platform or device, then there is also no need to enable it.

However if you do then you can enable it as follows

• iPhone – go to ‘Settings’ -> ‘Display’ -> ‘Advanced’ -> ‘Tweetings Sync’
• iPad – go to ‘Settings’ -> ‘Display’ -> ‘Advanced’ -> ‘Tweetings Sync’
• Mac – go to the main ‘Tweetings’ menu next to the Apple symbol at the top left -> ‘Preferences’ -> ‘Sync’
• Chrome – go to the ‘Options’ icon at the top right of the popup -> ‘Tweetings Sync’

How does it work… the detail

Whenever you refresh a timeline, or get new tweets, or send a tweet you may get new tweets downloaded.  We take the unique identifier of that first, top, tweet of your home, mentions and DM timelines and sync them back you the external Tweetings System.

When you load on another device or platform, we grab what that identifier was, mark everything below it as read and then scroll you to exactly that position.

Please note we take the top tweet in a given timeline, not where you may have scrolled to, so when you leave one client or platform and go to another we assume everything from the previous client was read.

Sometimes it’ll load all of them and sometimes you’ll see a gap. A gap means there are more Tweets than we can retrieve in a single call to the Twitter API. Tapping the gap goes off and loads some more, etc.

Now the Twitter API has a maximum number of tweets that you can call in a single api request. That number is 200.

Tweetings is only loading 100 though

In a recent update to both Tweetings for iPhone and Tweetings HD for iPad this number changed to 100 instead of 200, why is this.

Well Twitter are shortly going to wrap ALL url’s on Twitter with their own shortener called t.co (see http://support.twitter.com/entries/109623)

Now if we didn’t make the changes we have already, then when this is switched on by default you won’t easily be able to tell where a link leads, if a Tweet has an image in it, if it has TwitLonger content associated with it, etc.

Twitter have dealt with this through a system called entities. In short this is a system we can enable in the background that allows us to decode these t.co links for display purposes so we can still analyse these links for images, etc.

Why can’t you load 200 tweets though

We tried this in testing and 9 times out of 10 the first time you called your timelines Twitter would return an HTTP status code of 502. To you and me, this is the code for the Over Capacity / Fail Whale. Calling the timeline a second time would actually load it.

We asked Twitter about this and their response was

The count=200 limit was created when the timelines contained less information. As Twitter has grown and added more data to the timelines the amount of processing required has increased. What this means to developers is including all the retweets and entities takes too long when asking for 200 statuses at once and will result in a 502 error the first time the data is requested.

The current workaround is to request less than 200 per page and instead request more pages. Alternatively use one of the Streaming API methods to receive data and use the REST API for other interactions.

We are working to allow this amount of data to be returned in one request however it requires a longer term solution.

Updating the summary to better reflect the issue and marking as longterm

There you have it, straight from Twitter themselves. If you want us to be able to provide a stable client, but also be able to unwrap the t.co url shortener we had to make a tough decision to lower the default amount of Tweets you can call on refreshing a timeline.

You can turn this off in the settings. It’s called ‘Expand URLs’ but we really don’t recommend you do so.

What about the Tweets per Page setting

This setting is exactly what is says. It’s for loading Tweets on SUBSQUENT pages and is totally ignored for refreshing timelines. However this should also only have a maximum value of 100 and not 200 too if you don’t want to see lots of over capacity errors!

But I still get Over Capacity errors at 100 tweets

It’s likely that an entity is corrupt in your timeline and it’ll pass in time, or that Twitter timed out requesting those entities and by the time you refresh it’s been generated and will work.

However that being said there is absolutely nothing we as API developers can do about it, the error firmly lies with Twitter themselves, complain to them about forcing t.co on us

Can I turn this off?

Yes you can through the ‘Expand URLs’ setting in the app itself.  However if you do this no t.co link will be decoded… which means when Twitter turns this on for EVERY link, as is their plan to do so, you’ll no longer know what is an image link, twitlonger, etc and they’ll open in a web browser instead.

This is a high resolution display with more pixels than your eye can physically see. Tweetings for iPhone as it is now will still work and look pretty much the same as it is now.

Upgrade to Tweetings 3.1 (when it’s submitted and approved) and you’ll immediately see some amazing, sharp, images.

Here is just a little teaser at full size

This is a big release for Tweetings, with many internal core changes and many changes noticable to you, the user.

New Features

• Add and manage multiple file attachments to a Tweet
• Update your name, description, location and website from your profile
• Tap your profile avatar when on your profile to select a new image from your photo library
• Verified users will display the verified logo in lists of users
• Protected users will display a padlock in lists of users
• Saved searches are now cached on the search page
• Now displays search with a mix of popular and recent tweets
• Time can be changed in timeline between 12 hour, 24 hour or relative format
• New popup menu when tap and hold a timeline status or tapping the user’s avatar in the timeline

Changes

• Redesigned search screen
• Redesigned the read tracker handling routine
• Migrated TwitPic, MobyPicture & Twitgoo image uploads and TwitVid & MobyPicture video uploads and MobyPicture audio uploads to oAuth Echo. They will no longer require you to give Tweetings your password
• GeoLocation manager re-written to improve GPS location
• Twitter password setting removed from Settings page

Bug Fixes

• Follow button disabled on user’s own profile
• One character Tweets would crash when posting

First up is oAuth Echo support. If you haven’t read our post about oAuth Echo, then please do so.

Next we have the features people have been asking for….

• Multiple attachment support… yes it’s here and it’s done fantastically.  What do we mean by that, well if you are uploading 3 pictures and one fails, it will stop, let you fix it and reupload but only upload the ones that failed. You can preview attachments and individually remove them
• Update your own profile, including your profile photo
• Totally redesigned search page that we think you’ll love
• Suggested users
• Totally redesigned read tracker so you’ll have no more reopening Tweetings to discover messages you marked as read as unread again

Quite a few more features, changes and bug fixes too but we can’t spoil all the surprises can we?

Basic Authentication is a simple way of interacting with a user’s Twitter account, however there are problems with this, your Twitter username and password and submitted with each request and the application has to store this information.

If that service became compromised then your Twitter login information could be in the hands of someone else.

Don’t fret as Twitter have had a more secure service for sometime called oAuth. oAuth is a good thing.

• you don’t have to change your account details in a client if you change your password;
• your login is performed directly on Twitter’s website and not stored in the application at all

Tweetings has supported oAuth logins since day one… so what’s the reason for this post?

Push Notifications

Quite early on we migrated our push notifications to oAuth instead of Basic Authentication, so you should notice no difference in your push notifications after the deadline

Image, Video & Audio Uploading

You are most likely to notice the issue when trying to upload an image to services such as TwitPic, yFrog, etc

At the moment most of these services require your login information and use Basic Authentication.  Twitter has developed a system called oAuth Echo to allow these types of services to carry on working after the deadline.  Of course the Twitter Client also needs to update it’s code to cope with oAuth Echo too.

Any clients and/or media hosts that haven’t switched to oAuth Echo will in most likely hood cease to work correctly after the deadline

oAuth Echo & Tweetings

In version 3.0, coming soon, we have implemented oAuth Echo in Tweetings.

As of the time of writing, the following media providers are also oAuth Echo enabled and will automatically carry on working after 30th June 2010, so long as you are using Tweetings 3.0 or later

Pictures

• TwitPic
• Twitgoo
• MobyPicture
• yFrog

Video

• TwitVid
• MobyPicture
• yFrog

Audio

• MobyPicture

We will carry on integrating other services once they make the switch but after 30th June, if you find your favourite provider has ‘stopped’ working then please switch to one of the list above (which we will keep up-to-date) to carry on uploading.

We will remove ANY providers from Tweetings that haven’t made the switch after the deadline

Update: Twitgoo has been added to the list of supported oAuth echo providers
Update 2: MobyPicture support for image, video & audio
Update 3: yFrog supported added to Tweetings for iPad 1.3.  It was too late for Tweetings 3 but it will be added in an update