Twitter has been completing the migration of third party applications, such as Tweed, to use their new authentication methods. (For more on the authentication details, please see Twitter's developer docs.)
One result of this change is that the free version of Tweed no longer works. As we have noted in the past, we are no longer supporting the free version of Tweed, so we will not be upgrading it to work with Twitter's new authentication scheme.
We understand this will frustrate many Tweed users. For a limited time, the paid version of Tweed will be available for $0.99, in all markets. This price change should appear in the App Catalog soon.
Version 1.20 is available in the App Catalog.
- photo tweets (only TwitPic and Posterous)
- video upload switched from TwitVid to Posteous (authentication issues)
- refresh on lists would reload current tweets
- lists causing duplicate/false notifications
Limited Media Upload Options
As Twitter is migrating to its new authentication mechanism, the various photo services are also doing their migration. However, they are in different stages of readiness, so at the moment only TwitPic and Posterous photo upload are supported.
Similarly, video upload has been switched to Posterous because of authentication support.
In a rush to release this version, some text in Tweed was not translated to the various languages and will only appear in English (though this version of Tweed is available in all international Palm App Catalogs).
Sorry again for the hassles with the new authentication model.
Local deal pioneer, and our client Groupon has just launched deal personalization, allowing users to receive deals that are more relevant based on zip code and personal preferences. This is great for all the fans of Groupon out there, as it gives them more interesting deals to choose from, and it allows Groupon to distribute more deals in each city it serves.
We're excited to have gotten a chance to help with this feature, and look forward to seeing how this reshapes the daily deal landscape!
There appears to have been a data center outage early morning, affecting a number of applications including Pivotal Tracker. This has caused connectivity problems for users in some locations, and it appears to still be persisting for some.
We're working with our hosting provider to get this resolved as soon as possible, this is our top priority.
This is the second data center outage this week. At the moment, we do not have enough information to know whether the outages are related.
Also, we have received reports that Tracker has been unreachable from certain parts of the world (including China) since the migration to a new data center last week. We've filed a request with Engine Yard to investigate, and hope to have this resolved soon.
Our apologies for the inconvenience these outages have caused. We'll post more information here as we receive it. You can also follow @pivotaltracker on Twitter for updates.
Pivotal Tracker is moving to a new private cloud hosting environment at Engine Yard this Thursday, July 22, starting at 8pm PDT.
Planned downtime is approximately one hour, but because we're changing IP addresses of the Tracker servers, it may take longer for DNS changes to full propagate.
If you've opened your firewall to a specific IP address for Tracker integrations, you'll need to make changes. We'll post the new address of the integrations server after the move, you can also 'ping api.pivotaltracker.com' to resolve it.
Apologies for the inconvenience, we're hoping for noticeable performance improvements in the new environment.
As you know, photo and video tweets are broken in version 1.8. The reason has to do with Twitter's new authentication mechanism, but the core problem was a mistake on our part.
Tweed (like most Twitter applications) used to store both your username and password.
Twitter is requiring all third party apps use their new authentication mechanism (for more on that, see Twitter's developer docs ). With this new mechanism, Tweed no longer stores your password, which is better from a security standpoint.
This caused media integration to break, as third party services like TwitPic or yFrog, typically also use your Twitter username and password. As Tweed no longer has your password, it is failing to upload your media.
Twitter was requiring that all apps be ready by the end of June (the cutoff date has now been extended). Unfortunately, our developers bandwidth was limited and, in our rush to update Tweed, we did not account for the changes to the media integration.
Many of these services offer a compatible authentication mechanism. We are in the process of changing Tweed to use these methods. We should have done this before version 1.8 was released and we are sorry for the frustration this has caused users.
There are some other bugs that have been reported, such as broken Conversation view with protected users. We are working on these as well.
We also are sorry we have been so silent on Twitter and email lately. As you know, we are normally tried to be responsive and engaged with our users. Unfortunately our Tweed resources are not dedicated to Tweed and they've been juggling responsibilities at the moment.
We hope to have the fix submitted to Palm soon.
For the next month or so, we will be rolling out a series of changes to various parts of the Tracker server architecture, including moving to a Memcached distributed cache for certain requests, cookie based sessions, switching from Mongrel to Passenger, splitting the very large history table, etc.
We're doing this to improve performance, and eliminate potential scaling issues as our traffic grows. To reduce risk, we'll introduce these changes in separate updates, once a week.
These updates will occur on Wednesdays at 7:30pm PDT (including tonight), and last under an hour each. If there are any long running migrations needed, we'll plan them for weekends, or handle them incrementally, to avoid any extended down times.
We understand that these week night outages are inconvenient to many of you, especially in Asia. We apologize in advance, and will try and keep the updates as brief as possible.
A common feature request from teams that have multiple projects on the go in Pivotal Tracker is the ability to move stories between projects. We've just added that feature.
Starting Jun 30, the Twitter API will no longer allow 3rd party applications (such as Tracker) to connect using your Twitter username and password. Instead, applications will be required to use OAuth, an authentication protocol that allows users to approve a 3rd party application to act on their behalf without sharing their username/password.
Pivotal Tracker now uses OAuth for project Twitter notifications. When you enable this feature for your project (see the integrations help page for more on that), you'll be asked to sign in to Twitter (on the Twitter site), and give the Pivotal Tracker application permission to access your Twitter account.
If you have enabled Twitter notifications for your project(s) prior to this release, the stored credentials are in the username/password format. You'll need to remove these old credentials, by clicking the 'Remove Twitter Credentials' button. After you've done that, click the 'Sign In With Twitter' button to re-enable the Twitter notifications using the new, more secure OAuth way.
More information on Twitter and OAuth can be found here.
Version 1.6 has been submitted and should be in the App Catalog soon.
Bugs
- Character counter didn't work if "Post on Enter" was enabled
- Couldn't post a photo tweet without text
Features and Changes
- geo tagging of tweets
- configurable notification sound
- (hopefully) improved German translation
- Copy Tweet has been added to popup menu
- preference to enable/disable metatap copy for tweets
- Email / SMS / IM tweets
Geo Tagging
- preference to enable geo tagging
- tweets will include location/geo tag metadata if Tweed preference is enabled and Twitter setting for adding location is enabled
- Tweets with geo tags will display link to location (in popup menu and in tweet)
Popup menu
Our poll results for changing the popup menu resulted in 46% for A, 54% for B. Only about 100 people responded. So while B won by a small majority, we've implemented option A, as that was the smallest change to Tweed and we felt the least disruptive to the larger Tweed userbase.
We may change this based on feedback.
