Article 25

Twiggy is live!

By Ryan

26 March 2009 | Category: Code

After four days, we’ve launched our first mobile widget: Twiggy. In case you haven’t been following the progress, we teamed up with Betavine to spread the word about the niftiness of mobile widgets. We thought the best way to demonstrate that was to build a simple mobile widget to show you all how it’s done.

Screenshot of Twiggy home page

Hopefully we’ve given you a bit more ammo to build kickass ideas for your clients and web apps! We’ve open-sourced the whole project, so please feel free to download and hack away :)

A huge thank you to @mikekus and @elliottkember for all their hard work – you guys rock.

9:38 Update: Twiggy works in the browser! Visit http://www.elliottkember.com/twiggy to try it out. It also works on the iPhone!

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Comments

http://www.iamfrankstallone.com Frank Stallone

Congratulations guys! I never watched someone (live) launch a project like this. =)
http://dsgn4fun.com Herus Armstrong

4 Days? Awesome! Congratulations guys!
http://www.mskempster.com Matthew

Well done!

Was fascinating watching the progress on Qik and the result is brilliant.

Just wish I had an S60 phone.
http://www.little-empire.co.uk Steven

Great stuff, looks good.

Many thanks for keeping us informed of what you had to do to achieve this.
Damian Walsh

Superb, great work guys and in only four days! Really impressed by your generous and open approach in sharing the development process with the community.
http://carsonified.com Ryan

Thanks everyone! Mike and Elliott did a great job.
http://www.jordanmooredesign.com Jordan Moore

Guys this really looks awesome. The whole look and feel from the widget to the website is perfect, I want it!
http://twitter.com/micajobe/ Micah

Great work guys. This is simple and super useful!
http://www.marinafrederico.carbonmade.com marina frederico

Hey, there.

Congrats for your widget! Very cool, indeed. I’ve been asking myself for a while now how come no one on twitter had figured that we need filters, discussion groups or anything that allows us to find tweets about subjects of our interests.

Great job!

;)
http://www.virtuallyready.com Lisa Duhamel

Awesome innovative work, guys! Thanks so much for sharing with us. Keep it going!
http://www.helloimjames.com James Kirkup

Interesting stuff guys, just checked it on the iphone browser and it looks neat – 4 days well used!
http://www.flockey.com James McDonald

Mike Kus, you are simply brilliant!
What an amazing design :)

Great work Carsonified. Unfortunately I can’t use the widget due to not having an iPhone or Nokia. I only have the Samsung Tocco.
http://www.twitter.com/mikekus mike kus

Thanks James… you’re too kind :)
I’ll give you the £20 down the pub later ;)
http://www.ryanjwood.com Ryan Wood

Great work for such a short period of time!
http://carsonified.com Ryan

Thanks everyone! By the way, Elliott has ported the widget to iPhone at elliottkember.com/twiggy – enjoy!
http://www.elliottkember.com Elliott

Like this:
http://www.elliottkember.com Elliott

Like this:
Tony T

Were you guys paid to promote this mobile widgets stuff?
http://angryamoeba.co.uk Dan Glegg (@angryamoeba)

Why package up HTML/CSS into a platform-specific bundle when there is already an open standard for this packaging? (Hint: it’s called a web browser). You’ve not really been clear on why you think mobile widgets are something that should be evangelised, and that’s something I’m genuinely interested to understand.

Secondly, Twiggy seems buggy to me. You can have duplicate favourites, and clicking the links on the search results page frequently results in that users’ twitter background being displayed without any page data, forcing me to use the browser’s back button to restore functionality. I’m not sure how much of that is mitigated by running it in the ‘proper’ widget environment as opposed to desktop safari, but the experience from within Safari could definitely do with some TLC.
http://thebestseoservices.com seo guy

Thank you guys! for sharing with this awesome work . Keep it going!
http://www.elliottkember.com Elliott

@Dan,

You raise a good point. The web browser is a very good open standard for this packaging, and that’s what’s being used here. The runtime is actually the Opera rendering engine, packaged for the phone. So nothing here is proprietary. In fact, the fact that you can use this widget as an AIR app, on the web, on the iPhone – anywhere. It’s being rendered as HTML. It’s even here in this comment thread, and that’s the exact same code that runs on the phone.

I don’t think that mobile web widgets should be evangelised, and I personally apologise if it seems like I’ve been doing that. But I do think that it’s interesting to see that companies like Nokia and Vodafone are taking HTML seriously as an application framework. They’re using a fairly standards-compliant rendering engine, too – that’s very important.

As for Twiggy’s bugs, my only answer is “yeah, pretty much”. The thing was designed to work on the phone, and I was paid to make it work on the phone, and it does that. It was a four-day widget, which happens to work on the web. From time to time I do little things to it, adding bits and pieces, so I’ll fix that favourites bug at some point for you. If people are using it as a web app, or a desktop app, then I should probably fix it!

@Tony T: Carsonified were paid to develop the app, and they paid me to build it. So, in that sense, yeah. Do you promote the stuff you build?
http://angryamoeba.co.uk Dan Glegg (@angryamoeba)

@Elliot, Thanks for answering.

I don’t think that mobile web widgets should be evangelised, and I personally apologise if it seems like I’ve been doing that.

Oh hell no, man. I was putting that question to Carsonified as an organisation, not yourself personally. Apologies if I caused a misunderstanding.

But I do think that it’s interesting to see that companies like Nokia and Vodafone are taking HTML seriously as an application framework.

It is interesting, don’t get me wrong. But it’s not an application framework until you give it some local capabilities, like local storage and some access to device functions. It’s crucial that these local system APIs be standardised (no doubt they’ll be presented through javascript, a la Palm’s WebOS) or the cross-platform capabilities of HTML-based mobile apps will be worth precisely bugger all. Will the hardware and OS vendors cooperate to make a standardised JS API onto common mobile functions like telephony, sms, camera operation, and address lookup, and will they implement a common security and permissions model around it? Let’s face it, they probably won’t, and the result will be that platform-specific compiled applications will still be needed in order to take proper advantage of the mobile platform. HTML5 will address the local storage concerns to some extent, but access to local system functions is still a concern.

As for Twiggy’s bugs, my only answer is “yeah, pretty much”.

The only thing you may have problems with in some widget environments is that they often provide access to system calls (as mentioned above) and therefore code from 3rd party websites running within the more permissive security environment of a widget should be filed under DO NOT WANT. That’s why I raised the issue of clickable links loading the destination site within the widget – I’m fairly sure the links will open in the phone’s mobile browser in the real widget environment, but I thought I’d raise it anyway.

Cheers for answering!
Dan
Ianf

@Marina Frederico: “how come no one on twitter had figured that we need filters, discussion groups or anything that allows us to find tweets about subjects of our interests.”

Well, they sort-of already have – search.twitter.com is live, and some small subset of users get it integrated into their own sidebar, but as a whole Twitter is struggling with scaling and constant outages, so they’re not as free to roll it out @large as the third-party-independent Twiggy.
http://www.p01.org Mathieu ‘p01′ Henri

Saw a bug in the online version of Twiggy ( http://www.elliottkember.com/twiggy/ ). The Searching Twitter for ” is not removed or replaced by a sensible text when the search returns zero results.
http://www.p01.org Mathieu ‘p01′ Henri

Oh, and a bug or at least something unexpected on the comment system of this blog :p in the comment above I copy/paster the P tag from Twiggy, with its class name and everything, and that markup snippet was stripped instead of being HTML encoded as I expected from the list of XHTML tags allowed in the comments.

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