Tweed 1.5: Bug Fixes and Video Beta

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Version 1.5 has been submitted and should be in the App Catalog soon.

Bugs

Load More showing gaps in home timeline ( see below)
Links causing app to freeze
Notifications not clearing on loading the timeline
Wrong (and really big) notification counts in dashboard

Forward Gesture/Compose is still broken — seems to be problem in webOS 1.4 update. (This seems broken in web browser application as well)

Features and Changes

basic/beta TwitVid integration for uploading video

Load More

Before 1.3, some users had gaps in their home timelines when clicking “Load More”. We tried to fix this in 1.3 and probably made things worse.

We are going back to the previous methods we had in 1.2. While users may still see gaps, the problem seems to on the Twitter side. In more expansive testing, it seems that the Twitter API occasionally return the wrong tweets for Load More. We are trying to find out more from Twitter

While we think the Load More behavior will be better, we don’t think this is fully resolved and might be outside our control.

Opening Links and Frozen App

This is a bit complicated. We thought our update to 1.3 fixed this. It did, for some users, it didn’t for others.

Apparently there are some bugs in Palm’s installer that have led to some files not being overridden, even though they changed. Upon testing, we’ve discovered version 1.3 installations that still have some of the 1.2 files.

We are hoping this update forces an overwrite of the files in question, but it may not for everyone. For those that still have trouble with links freezing the app:

try deleting Tweed first, then re-install — this should clear out old files
if it still doesn’t work, please email us at tweed-support@pivotallabs.com

Video Beta

We have integrated TwitVid uploads with Tweed. We consider this a beta and expect users to experience some problems. Honestly we wanted to let people experiment sooner than later.

The largest problem is upload stability — video files can be sizable and the upload may fail, especially over cell. We suggest using video with wifi only.

There are some webOS challenges unfortunately to making this integration more robust. The file upload mechanism in webOS doesn’t allow for resuming a failed upload: it is all or nothing. For larger files (like video), this is a bit fragile.

We are hoping Palm will provide other upload mechanisms that will allow us to make this more robust, but honestly, we are a bit stuck unless they make these changes.

We plan to make add features to Tweed to provide better feedback about progress and help make retries easier.

Free Version

As we announced some time ago, we are no longer continuing development on the free version of Tweed. We haven’t the resources to continue developing two versions of the application.

Unfortunately, webOS 1.4 has broken Tweed and this is something we weren’t expecting. However, we still aren’t in a position to support both versions (free version is no longer in US catalog), so users of 0.9.x won’t be getting an update. We are sorry for this and understand it will make Tweed unusable for many/most users of this version.

To make it easier for free users to upgrade to the paid version, we are going to reduce the price of Tweed from $2.99 to $0.99 for the next few weeks. As with all Palm apps, updates are free.

Tweed
Tweed

Look sharp, the build just went red (on Campfire)!

Pivotal Labs

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

In order to post to our Campfire chat when the CI goes red, we threw the following script in script/campfire_post:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'net/http'
require 'uri'
require 'json'

url = URI.parse('http://SUBDOMAIN.campfirenow.com/room/ROOM_ID/speak.json')
req = Net::HTTP::Post.new(url.path)
req.basic_auth 'API_KEY', 'X' # leave the X
req.body = JSON.dump({ :message => { :body => ARGV.first }})
req.content_type = 'application/json'
res = Net::HTTP.new(url.host, url.port).start {|http| http.request(req) }
case res
  when Net::HTTPSuccess, Net::HTTPRedirection
    # OK
  else
    res.error!
end

And then in cruise.rake:

desc "The task that cruisecontrol.rb runs"
task :cruise do
  begin
    rake "spec"
    # etc
    # etc
  rescue
    exclaim = ["Oh goodness, t", "OMG t", "Look sharp, t", "Attention everyone! T", "Ohnoes! T"][rand * 5]
    system "ruby script/campfire_post '#{exclaim}he build just went red!'"
    raise
  end
end

And it’s even cheeky!

SF Standup 3/3/2010: Disappearing response codes

Jacob Maine

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

A Palm project uses Prototype for their ajax calls. They noticed that Prototype casts low-level errors (network errors, etc.) to a response code of 0. Unfortunately, the rest of Prototype interprets 0 as “success”. When they hacked Prototype to interpret 0 as a failure, another darker problem emerged. In some cases, for example if they send two requests in rapid succession, even if both responses have 200 in their headers, Prototype will report the second’s response code as 0. So, 0 can indicate success or failure in different scenarios.

SF Standup 3/2/2010: Rubyconf Proposal workshop

Jacob Maine

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Reminder: tonight we’re hosting a workshop to help you polish your RailsConf presentation proposal. Sign up or just drop in. Thanks to our own Sarah Mei for coordinating and running the workshop.
“Anyone familiar with the new RubyMine test runner? We’d like to integrate Jasmine tests, so we can run headless JS tests in the IDE.”

SF Standup 3/1/2010: JRuby skips ensure blocks when killed

Jacob Maine

Monday, March 1, 2010

When you kill a JRuby process (e.g. with a SIGINT) you can’t bank on ensure blocks being executed. Of course, this is worrisome – file handles and other connections won’t be closed. The problem boils down to this example:

$ cat kill_me.rb
begin
  sleep
ensure
  puts 'executed ensure'
end
$
$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.6 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 287) [universal-darwin9.0]
$
$ ruby kill_me.rb
^Cexecuted ensure
kill_me.rb:2:in `sleep': Interrupt
    from kill_me.rb:2
$
$ jruby -v
jruby 1.4.0 (ruby 1.8.7 patchlevel 174) (2009-11-02 69fbfa3) (Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM 1.6.0_13) [x86_64-java]
$
$ jruby kill_me.rb
^C$