In the past, we've been asked if we planned to charge for Tweed. Until recently, we hadn't made a decision. Tweed began as an application we developed to learn Palm webOS, and it grew into something we started to depend on, so we decided to release it to the App Catalog.
At this point, Tweed has a thriving user base and continues to grow in its maturity and capabilities. However, this does come with considerable costs to Pivotal Labs and we can't indefinitely subsidize the entire cost of development. So, we've decided to make Tweed a paid application in the App Catalog.
We are committed to continuing to develop and support Tweed. Charging for it will let us keep bringing you new features, like the ones in the 1.0 release.
Existing Tweed users can continue to use the current version, (0.9.16) and you can still grab a copy until the paid apps are available; it will not timebomb and we're happy for you to keep using it. However, it will be removed from the App Catalog when the paid version replaces it. Hopefully you'll find the new features compelling enough to upgrade. (Unfortunately it will install as a new application, so you will have to re-enter your accounts and you will lose existing timeline markers and bookmarks. Sorry, this is a consequence of the new App Catalog and we have no influence over this.)
For Canadian users, Tweed will continue to be free until Palm launches a commerce enabled App Catalog in Canada. (This will be true for new Palm Pre markets as well.)
Features
There will be a variety of new features available in the initial 1.0.0 release of the paid application.
- true, direct photo upload (no more email)
- TwitPic, TwitGoo, TweetPhoto, yFrog, Posterous
- new notifications dashboards
- full-screen view of user profile image (tap user picture on user profile scene)
- preference for number of tweets on fetch
- ability to change password
- show number of tweets in user profile
- direct messages can include photos
Roadmap
While we have lots planned for Tweed, some items of note include:
- themes
- landscape support
- bit.ly / j.mp url shorteners
- Flickr upload support
- more...
Pricing
Tweed will normally cost $3.99. However, for the next few weeks, to help ease the transition, we will offer Tweed for the discounted price of $1.99.
We thank you all of using Tweed. While we know some of you will be disappointed that Tweed will be a paid-only application, we hope you will enjoy the new Tweed.
0.9.16 of Tweed is now available in the App Catalog.
Changes:
- loading spinner/scrim has been replaced with spinner/cancel button (like web browser app)
- Tweed will auto-retry connecting to Twitter on failure response from Twitter API (this has been recently causing Tweed to hang))
- option to cancel active request by tapping cancel button; tapping refresh will retry (instead of having to re-select timeline from nav menu)
- shake for retry and refresh
Shake
We've added support for the accelerometer shake events. If you shake your phone while on a timeline:
- if loading (Twitter is taking a long time), this will force a retry
- if no active loading, then refreshes (same as hitting refresh button)
So, you could always force a retry by tapping cancel, then refresh, but we figure you can vent some frustration by shaking the phone. 
Rob and I were recently asked by a client for some help justifying the choice of Ruby as an implementation language for their SaaS product. They were very happy with the results, but wanted to be prepared to answer investor and customer questions about why Rails was a good choice.
One way that I've been talking about Rails is in the context of what I'm calling "The ARC Model": Agile + Rails + Cloud. I'll borrow from my abstract from my talk at BizConf:
The Ruby on Rails Revolution has been one of productivity and efficiency, and has coincided with an equally powerful revolution in the ownership of technological infrastructure. The Rails approach combines agile methods with a highly productive language to allow developers to focus on developing business value, instead of developing plumbing. The Cloud Computing Revolution at the same time has changed the economics of infrastructure, allowing computation to become a commodity not worthy of developer attention, further enabling developers to focus on that which is truly valuable, Innovation. These three factors, Agile, Rails, and the Cloud, combine to revolutionize the economics of software development and information management, in ways that directly impact return on investment.
The question should not be, “is Rails a safe choice,” but “[how long] can we justify the expense of traditional development approaches.”
I think this kind of approach plays nicely to the strengths of SaaS.
In terms of large enterprise deployments, it's early yet: Enterprises tend to be conservative (about Rails as they are about SaaS) so most of the innovation has been in the startup space, with companies like Hulu being good examples of the disruptive power of Rails.
But that said, there have been some major mainstream Enterprise success stories. AT&T chose to dump a failing Java yellowpages effort in favor of Rails, with excellent results in terms of scalability, time to market, code quality, and performance. (There's a decent write-up on BuildingWebApps.)
We are starting to see major companies develop ever more mission/business/revenue-critical components in Rails. BestBuy built Remix, their new public API app, with us using Rails. We have one major multinational client who is rewriting their entire ERP system in Ruby internally. We have another major hardware vendor building new products using Rails.
Large companies tend to be a bit shy about talking about new technology initiatives, and we suspect that most Fortune 500 companies have someone doing Rails somewhere in the organization. There are a number of others we've spoken to who are using the technology to their advantage, but who aren't ready to talk about it publicly yet. But you can also search for job listings from major companies and see how many big companies are hiring Rails developers. We see them all the time.
Hard statistics are harder to come by, but Mark Driver at Gartner projected that there would be 4 million ruby programmers by 2013. We're already seeing the smart companies get huge efficiencies out of these new development models: efficiencies of cost, flexibility, and time to market.
We're very bullish on Agile, Rails and the Cloud. In the current economic climate, the reduction in risk alone is worth the cost of admission. Coupled with the qualitative benefits of being able to out-flank your competition, it's no surprise that we're continuing to see adoption grow so rapidly. The results are too compelling to ignore.
We've made some minor changes to Pivotal Tracker this week, and added a few new features. As always, we look forward to you feedback on Satisfaction.
Ability to Override Length of an Iteration
Teams that use longer iterations occasionally run into situations where a particular iteration needs to be of a different length than the rest. One example is a Scrum team, running 3 weeks sprints, that decides to cancel a sprint in the second week. To keep Tracker iterations aligned with real-world cycles/springs, it's now possible to override how long a particular iteration is or will be, in # of weeks.
Click on the iteration start date to override it's length, or revert an override. An iteration's date range will appear in yellow if it's been overridden. Also, Tracker will automatically adjust how many points worth of stories fit into a longer (or shorter) iteration.
Explicit Project Start Date
Normally, the first iteration of a project begins the week of the date of the first accepted story. For multi-week iterations, it's sometimes desirable to specify exactly when the project started. You can now do this, using the Start Date field in your project settings.
If a start date is specified, your project will start on that day, or the date of the first accepted story, whichever is earlier.
Preview Balloon for Story Descriptions
Based on popular demand, the preview balloon is back for stories that have a description (but no comments). Note - you can see a preview for all stories by hovering over the story type and estimate icons.
Story Labels on the Left
We've moved the story labels back to the left of story titles. The motivation for moving the labels to the right (in the previous release) was to align story titles vertically, for easier visual scanning. However, we received a lot of feedback that this made it harder to see groups of related stories, for which labels are commonly used for.
We may introduce a way to either hide labels, or configure where they appear, but for the time being, we've moved them back where they used to be.
Enhanced Project Export
It's now possible to export a subset of the stories in your project, by choosing whether to include done stories, stories in current/backlog, or the icebox.
Current Day in Points Breakdown Chart
The points breakdown chart now includes data for the current day. Previous day counts are all based on a nightly snapshot, but the current day counts reflect the current state of the project.
We know many users have been very frustrated by Tweed lately. Tweed has had problems connecting reliably to Twitter. While other clients, be it mobile or desktop, have also had problems connecting to Twitter, Tweed does seem to be more frequently affected.
The conundrum is that it is intermittent and seemingly arbitrary. Some users are just fine, others seem to never have a working Tweed. For ourselves, we occasionally have problems with Tweed as well, but not nearly as often as some users, which has made diagnosis and resolution hard.
These problems seem to have started after the recent DDoS attacks on Twitter. Before that, Tweed seemed to connect fine and we haven't changed our integration. Perhaps something changed in Twitter's API implementation that is at odds with Tweed -- we don't know.
At the very least, please know we are actively working on it. While we are also working on making Tweed functionally better (true photo upload, more photo viewing options, full size profile pic viewing, ...), we are devoted to make Tweed as reliable and as fast as we can.
As always, you can reach us vai @tweed on Twitter,or via email at tweed-support@pivotallabs.com.
Jeff Sutherland, one of the creators of Scrum, has just posted a new blog entry in his Scrum Log: Pivotal Tracker: Now with a Burndown Chart!
I first met Jeff when we were both presenting on Agile process to a forum of OpenView Venture Partners portfolio companies, and have been a big fan of all he has to say about the adoption and effectiveness of agile practices in the wild.
Many thanks to Jeff for his help to make Tracker a better tool for scrum. We'll keep working with him to make sure Tracker is the best scrum tool it can be.