Nial Giacomelli

I’ve been putting together a new widget for the Dashboard called Peeq. Peeq is an OS X dashboard widget inspired by Shaun Inman’s fantastic Shortwave bookmarklet. Similar to Shortwave, Peeq responds to user-defined commands in order to perform simple, web-based searches. As the Shortwave website explains:

A command consists of a predefined trigger plus optional search terms.

Although users are welcome to add their own commands to the Peeq repository, the widget comes with a few by default. For instance, entering “g Airmailr” into a vanilla Peeq installation will perform a Google search for the term Airmailr.

Performing a simple Google search with Peeq

Time is a finite measure (a matter of fact, for all you Daniel Johnston fans) and Peeq works to make such unfortunate truths slightly easier to swallow. In short, Peeq compresses the effort involved in searching your favourite websites for content. Hopefully it does so in a way that is intuitive. Let’s take a look at exactly how it works:

By default, Peeq comes with two Twitter related commands. The first opens a Twitter users profile (t NialGiacomelli) and the second performs a Twitter search (ts Airmailr). But what if we want Peeq to be able to show us the latest tweets made by a specific Twitter user? Let’s check the existing commands list to see if we can find anything that’ll help us out. To access the existing commands list, click the + (plus) icon to the right of the search input pane.

From there, you’ll be shown a list of existing commands. Scroll down to the ts command and click it.

Editing an existing Peeq listing

The form below the command list should populate with the ts commands details. From here, we can either edit the command, or delete it altogether. For our purposes, we’re going to use the ts commands existing data and alter it slightly to create a new command.

First things first: let’s think up a new command name. We’ll go with tf, short for Twitter fetch (or maybe tu for Twitter user). Next, we’ll edit the URL string, changing it from: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%s to http://search.twitter.com/search?q=from:%s. In Twitter terms, adding from: to a search will cause only tweets from that particular user to be returned. Finally, we update the commands description to say something like: Show a Twitter users latest tweets. Now we’re free to close the existing commands pane and go ahead with a tf search:

I’m releasing Peeq in beta form to collect suggestions and general feedback. If it proves popular, I’ll think about giving the project it’s own place on the web. For now, you can grab a copy here.

It’s been an interesting few days. I wrote my first article as a guest author for CreativeApplications, which you can find here. The article is a brief look at Shaun Inman‘s Horror Vacui, and I was delighted to see that he noticed. On top of that, I pushed a few tweaks out to the Birdhive, launched a significant version of Airmailr (0.3), and put the finishing touches on my dissertation.

Interestingly, however, the latest version of Airmailr includes a URL shortening facility powered by is.gd. This was a difficult decision because, as much as I despise URL shortening, it’s currently a necessary evil. Thankfully, I’m not alone in my hatred of them.

Particularly, I hate adding an unnecessary reliance upon a third-party. I’m already dealing with Twitter as a third-party. But that’s acceptable. Twitter is an established company with a lot of venture capital, they’re not going to vanish overnight. Sadly, I can’t say as much for the various URL shortening services out there.

Birdhive is a link curation engine. Notice the emphasis on curation? The fact that Twitter relies on third party URL shortening services makes the act of curation extremely difficult. If tr.im were to vanish tomorrow, half of the URLs in our database would vanish without a trace. So how do we solve that? The obvious solution would be for Twitter to invest a bit of that venture capital into an ‘official’ Twitter URL shortening API. Sure, there’s still the possibility of data loss, but it’s made slightly more redundant by the fact that if Twitter were to cease to exist, so too would the need for short URLs.

Given that this is all very unlikely, the buck seems to stop with us as application developers. Birdhive, for instance, uses cURL to follow any URL it receives and stores the ‘final’ redirection address in a URL look-up database. At the moment, we’re not doing anything with those long URLs, but it’s nice to know they’re there.

We pushed out Airmailr 0.2.5 a little earlier than expected due to a few people making us aware of a number of nasty bugs. Of course, we’ve now learnt that releasing prematurely causes more headaches than it solves. Airmailr 0.2.5.1 was pushed about an hour after 0.2.5 to address some CSS rendering issues.

The problem with updating Dashboard widgets is that Apple seems to run some basic caching, which results in users seeing some messy styling (as documented here). Thankfully, the fix is pretty simple: just hit CMD (Apple) + R to force a refresh and everything should be back to normal.

Finally, we noticed we’ve been mentioned on Microblink, which is exciting. Notice, however, that I say we. Because Airmailr is the result of a two-headed beast. I’m in charge of development while my good friend Glynn Smith works on the graphic design. Since Microblink omitted his details in their article, I’d like to credit him here and say a big thank you for making Airmailr look as great as it does.