So I'm often a bit of a slacker when it comes to reading everyone's #fridayflash stories. On a good week I probably get through about half of the posted stories. It occurred to me on Friday that I own a device that's basically connected to the Internet ALL THE TIME. Of course, it's easy to lose track of everything getting posted on twitter. So, I decided what I needed was an iPhone app that would pluck #fridayflash stories out of twitter's stream and keep track of them on my phone.

Now, the iPhone isn't super-great for reading blog posts, but it *is* great for those moments when I have a bit of time to kill. Click to read details of what I have so far.

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How does it work?

Twitter provides a pretty handy API for programmers, so it's pretty easy for an application to perform a search in live stream of tweets. There are some limitations, though. Twitter's search will only return the most recent 100 search results so on a typical Friday, you'd probably have to check it a couple times of day. But then again, I'm not intending this as the be-all and end-all of #fridayflash reading. I want to use it as a tool to help me read more.

The app itself is pretty dead-simple. The main screen looks like:



I've broken stories up into three lists. I'm thinking of adding a fourth, which would break the stories into groups by week.

The Problem With Titles & Retweets

Of course, we Friday Flashers tend to do free-form tweets, which makes it hard to figure out what the title of a story is. The most common convention I saw was putting the title in quotes. So, if I find a phrase in the #fridayflash tweet in quotes, I treat that as the story's title. Otherwise I just take the first 40 characters and let the user sort it out.

Retweets are also a bit of a problem. I track URLs and throw away duplicates, but when people retweet their Twitter client often switches the URL. So someone will tweet with a tinyurl.com link and when someone else rewteets it, their client switches the link to a bit.ly one. *sigh* So to cut down the duplicates, if a tweet contains the phrase "RT", I toss it away. (I'm probably going to make that a configuration option) In the first screen, you

But, the FF tracker will never be perfect, so when you click on a story in the list, it brings up a details screen, like so:



The title and author fields are editable so if the Tracker didn't figure out the title you can fix it, if you're so inclined. To help you figure out what you're looking at, I display the original full tweet. You can mark it as a favourite, delete it, or open the blog up in Safari. When you do, the story is marked as read. When you return to the FF Tracker, you'll be returned to the story details screen.

Feeling Lucky?

You've got too many awesome stories to read? Paralyzed by choice and don't know where to begin? Shake your phone while on one of the list screens and the FF Tracker will open one at random for you.

What's Next?

I have to create some configuration options and possibly add the ability to un-favourite a story, as well as marking a story as unread. There's a bunch of testing to be done and I need to make the app handle a bit better when you can't connect to twitter.

Is this something you might be interested in? Maybe later this week I'll put out a call for beta testers, if you want to try it out. If I eventually decide it's worth putting in Apple's App Store, it will be free of charge. I'm writing it for myself, but if it's useful for a #fridayflash reader out there somewhere, I'm happy to give them a copy :)

What do you think? Suggestions? What kind of features would you want in a Friday Flash iPhone app?

14 responses to "Friday Flash iPhone Tracker "

mazzz_in_Leeds wrote: Tuesday, 26 Jan 2010 03:02 When's the Blackberry version being released? :-p

Chance wrote: Tuesday, 26 Jan 2010 04:33 Wooot! raises his hand for beta testing

Dana wrote: Tuesday, 26 Jan 2010 07:11 I totally would if I had a blackberry to develop on. You'll have to mail me yours for a few weeks :P

Dana wrote: Tuesday, 26 Jan 2010 08:07 Chance, I'll see if I can have it in a state I'm willing to let other people see before this weekend. B

trev wrote: Tuesday, 26 Jan 2010 09:11 Cool. If my Mac had not ground to a cold, dead halt yesterday afternoon, I would beta-test this to pieces. First, a little hardware maintenance...

PJ Kaiser wrote: Tuesday, 26 Jan 2010 10:02 Dana - You rock! :-)

Olivia Tejeda wrote: Wednesday, 27 Jan 2010 11:55 Raising hand for beta testing!!! This sounds fantastic, especially the shake-to-read part. Brilliant! I'm so in awe of people who program, it's so completely foreign and mystical to me! As wordpress.com says, "Code is poetry." A couple of questions ... when you click the link to a story, will it lead to the blog itself or open in the "app-site" the way tweetdeck does? After reading a story, will it have a check mark or gray out to show it's been read? Considering the varied format of tweets, would it be easier to create the list from the report Jon creates each week since that's already formatted? I'm usually half-way through my reading before the report is done, but find it useful to make sure I've read everyone (or at least as much as I'm able). Possibly you could work with Jon to coordinate these two things. In any case, I bow to the expert. So cool you can do something like this. I'm still trying to figure out how to format my blog! ~ Olivia

Dana wrote: Wednesday, 27 Jan 2010 12:54 At the moment, I have it opening the site in Safari, but I'm going to see about also opening them them in-app (and making it a configurable option). After playing with it for a couple of days, I think not having to switch back to the app from the browser would be more convenient. The story is removed from the Unread screen after you've viewed it, and I'm thinking of maybe bolding or making a different colour unread stories in the full list. Yeah, I was thinking to see if I could scrape the contents of the Friday Flash report since just polling twitter means some stories might be missed. Thanks for your interest :D

Skycyclet wrote: Wednesday, 27 Jan 2010 17:03 Fantastic Dana. What a great idea! I'd love to beta test if you still have need.

Tony Noland wrote: Tuesday, 02 Feb 2010 18:05 Gotta say, this is a fantastic idea. Too bad I use a Blackberry, and don't own an iPhone/iTouch.

Dana wrote: Tuesday, 02 Feb 2010 18:06 Thanks Tony :) I hope it'll be useful. I'd be delighted to do a Blackberry version if I had one. Although I've no clue what the dev tools for Blackberries are like.

danpowell wrote: Wednesday, 03 Feb 2010 04:39 Awesome stuff. I'll be downloading this for my ipod. Brilliant idea.

Sean Langley wrote: Friday, 12 Feb 2010 11:31 Awesome idea. My hand is raised to be a beta tester!

Dana wrote: Wednesday, 17 Feb 2010 16:06 Hey Sean, I want to make some changes to the app but when I'm ready to send out another version I'll let you know! Dana

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