Today, the first of what (I assume) will be a three part series: The Week Of Awesome Food.
4/15: Bistro 33 (Astoria, New York)
4/17: Momofuku Ko (Manhattan, New York)
4/22: Chez Panisse (Berkeley, California)
Categories
Month: April 2008
Categories
Examining Twinkle for the iPhone
An interesting new iPhone Twitter client appeared within the development community over the weekend. It’s called Twinkle, and while there’s no official homepage for it, there is (naturally) a Twitter account.
The interface is clean, although it’s a little hard to read while you’re walking due to what looks like an 8pt font. But as for why it’s interesting:
Twinkle is (through what is undoubtedly some interesting magic) using the iPhone location APIs to geolocate the messages sent through it. It also allows for pictures to be attached.
Curiously, unlike other attempts to add geographic metadata to Twitter, none of this information is stored within the Twitter message. (You can see this on the web version of the message pictured above.) Twinkleking has mentioned that the pictures are being stored on his/her/their web server, and I would assume the geolocation data is being similarly shadowed.
While I’m not crazy about shadow systems like this, Twinkle does work terribly well at what it intends to do – it’s a very natural enhancement to the Twitter experience.
It also gets me thinking that, between this and some of the other technologies people have tried to shoehorn into Twitter, that Twitter itself may want to consider providing some sort of extensibility to their base message model. Being able to add machine-readable metadata to any tweet, much like the machine tags on Flickr, would allow for all sorts of useful enhancements without breaking the core model.
In one hypothetical hand, I hold an instrumental version of Trent Reznor’s seminal (ha!) single, *Closer*. The original is directly sexual and raw. It continues to have one of the most familiar refrains in recent musical history – you know, the one about, er, doing things to people like an animal and feeling them from the inside.
(Warning: the song and the video, embedded below, are NOT SAFE FOR WORK. Also, do not play this if there are children in the area. Not because I don’t want them to see and/or hear it, but I don’t want to be held responsible if you hit the play button.)
In my other hypothetical hand, I hold the original staged version of *Business Time* by New Zealand’s fourth most popular folk rock parody band, *Flight Of The Conchords*. Never has the actual process of lovemaking been so accurately described.
(Strangely, the video for *Business Time* is flagged on YouTube, but the video for *Closer* is not.)
You can see where this is going, I’m sure. And certainly this hilarious photoshopped image will make it even clearer.
I would traditionally use this paragraph to half-heartedly apologize for ruining perfectly good songs in my mashups. Mocking my usual inability to find appropriate loops or sighing about parts where the track trainwreck, I would try to lower expectations.
Not this time. This one came out pretty well.
DOWNLOAD: Nine Inch Conchords – Closer To Business Time
(For the technically inclined, this was done in a very uncomplicated manner in Ableton Suite 7.)