Tag Archives: Announcement

Announcing: SuccessWhale version 2.0!

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Ladies and Gen­tle­men of the Inter­net, I am pleased to announce that Suc­cess­Whale ver­sion 2.0 has just been released and is now live on SuccessWhale.com.

Suc­cess­Whale is a web-based client for Twit­ter and Face­book, writ­ten in PHP, JavaScript and MySQL. It offers a multi-column view that allows users to merge together infor­ma­tion from all their con­nected accounts and view it at a glance from any web browser.

The big changes between ver­sion 1.1.2 and 2.0 are:

  • Face­book support
  • Sup­port for mul­ti­ple Twit­ter (and Face­book) accounts
  • As many columns as you want
  • Columns that com­bine mul­ti­ple feeds
  • Light­boxed images from Twit­pic and yFrog
  • New themes
  • Numer­ous bug fixes!

You can see a screen­shot of it in action below:

SuccessWhale Screenshot

I would par­tic­u­larly like to thank Alex Hut­ter, Hugo Day, Erica Ren­ton and Rg Enzon, whose help in find­ing bugs and sug­gest­ing new fea­tures has been instru­men­tal in bring­ing Suc­cess­Whale up to ver­sion 2.0 today.

Suc­cess­Whale is an open source project, and the source code is licenced under the GPL v3.

For the Discerning Lady or Gentleman, SuccessWhale version 1.1

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The sud­den pro­lif­er­a­tion of peo­ples’ syn­di­cated tweets from sources such as Foursquare and Fallen Lon­don annoys me far more than it should. Any more sen­si­ble old grouch would pick up his pipe, don slip­pers and write a strongly-worded let­ter to the local news­pa­per about how this ‘check­ing in’ busi­ness is cor­rupt­ing society.

Instead, I made my Twit­ter client block them. Also, you can now do it too!

Suc­cess­Whale users will now see a link at the top-right of the inter­face called ‘Man­age Banned Phrases’. Click­ing it will take you to a page where you can spec­ify a semicolon-separated list of things you don’t want to see, such as “4sq.com;fallenlondon.com;bieber”. Once con­firmed, any tweets in any time­line that are sucky enough to con­tain one of these phrases will be hid­den from your view.

Twit­ter: now 12% less full of shite!

An extra fea­ture has been rolled into this release, which is the ‘Reply All’ but­ton. It looks like this: It only appears where two or more peo­ple are hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion (three or more if you’re included too). Click­ing on it starts a reply to every­one men­tioned, not just the tweet’s orig­i­na­tor. So if @Alice is talk­ing to @Bob, and you click ‘Reply All’ on one of her tweets, your entry box will then read “@Alice @Bob”.

So that’s ver­sion 1.1. Share and enjoy!

Suc­cess­Whale is a free, open, multi-platform web-based Twit­ter client. It’s hosted at SuccessWhale.com, and you can find out more about Suc­cess­Whale here. It’s GPL–licenced, so you can down­load your­self a copy too if you want one.

a thousand words: First Sketches

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With the main brows­ing UI for a thou­sand words up and run­ning, it’s time to bore the world with more point­less trivia before mov­ing on. Today: design sketches!

Pretty much every soft­ware project I under­take these days begins with a sketch of the user inter­face and an ini­tial struc­ture for the data­base. Labour­ing under the cruel ‘no white­board’ con­di­tions at home (maybe I should get one?), I drew these out on paper. Pass­ing the UI sketch over to Eric after about 5 min­utes’ work, she described it as “awe­some”. I think that’s the first time that’s ever hap­pened; the gen­eral response at work is along the lines of “but where are you going to put giant-ugly-element-X that I’ve just thought of and wasn’t in the spec?”. So that was that, and I’ve coded it up pretty much as it was on paper.

The data­base hasn’t changed much from the orig­i­nal design yet, but it will have to soon — as designed, the vote (‘stars’) sys­tem doesn’t record each user’s vote on each story, so it can’t sup­port users chang­ing their vote. Some­time dur­ing devel­op­ment I’ll have to devote a few hours to fig­ure out the best way of han­dling it, though that prob­a­bly comes down to a few min­utes as some­one on Stack Over­flow has inevitably asked about it already.

a thousand words UI Sketch

UI Sketch


a thousand words Database Design

Data­base Design

Next up on a thou­sand words is cod­ing the first few forms that will allow users to reg­is­ter and log in, sub­mit pho­tos and sub­mit sto­ries. That should be done within the next few days, and will allow me to play with actu­ally chang­ing the con­tents of the data­base, rather than just show­ing views of it.

a thousand words: A New Timesink has Arrived!

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Some­how unable to cope with actu­ally hav­ing free time of an evening, I have taken on yet another project which will doubt­less push me deeper into the dark, untamed wilds of the inter­net, the land stalked only by the mys­te­ri­ous beast known as the “web developer”.

Eric has come up with the idea for a fiction-writing com­mu­nity known as “A Thou­sand Words”. The con­cept is simple:

  • Users sub­mit pho­tos or other images that they find interesting
  • Every week (or other suit­able period of time), one of these is cho­sen by the site staff
  • Users then write short sto­ries, of around 1000 words, inspired by the picture
  • Users rate, com­ment etc. on each other’s stories

I’ll be cod­ing up this site in my spare time over the next few weeks, and you can check out my cur­rent progress on the live site at a thou­sand words.  Cur­rently, the data­base design is done and I’m part­way through the UI of what will be the main page.  My todo list is roughly:

  1. Fin­ish the main page and story page UIs.
  2. Add bare-bones pages for all the GET/POST func­tions, e.g. reg­is­ter­ing accounts, sub­mit­ting sto­ries, sub­mit­ting pictures.
  3. Test all the functions.
  4. Work on their UIs.
  5. Start closed beta test­ing for any­one interested.
  6. Lib­er­ally apply jQuery to improve user experience.
  7. Add com­ment­ing, pos­si­bly via DISQUS.
  8. Add proper user pro­files, gra­vatar sup­port etc.
  9. Get every­one I can find to try and break it.
  10. Release!  Open the flood-gates, and despair at the drib­ble I receive.

As I go I’ll be post­ing updates and hopefully-interesting insights here, and you can always check the site at athousandwords.org.uk to see how I’m get­ting on.