Saturday, June 27th, 2009

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Hola Brave Beta Souls,

First, we just want to thank you for your interest in SuperTwitter. It really has been a labor of love and having interest from anybody else is icing on the cake. While we agree that there could be a lot of features to make it more of a Twitter Swiss Army Knife, for now we’re just really focused on the visual display. With more and more people referencing images with Twitter we discovered the fun when we layered the text on top of the images. It’s random and a very new way of looking at your Twitter channels. On the iPhone, well, it’s just a great screen to watch the show on.

Here’s how you try it out:

• On the iPhone’s Safari browser go to: http://beta.supertwitter.com
• Click on the the “login to Twitter” button
• You’ll be redirected to a Twitter authentication page
• After logging into your Twitter account you’ll be redirected back to SuperTwitter
• When you see the SuperTwitter logo slide in you can just tap to see each of the first twenty tweets in your account

A few things to know:

• It sometimes takes a while for things to load.
• If you return to the browser and want to see it again try refreshing the page or sometimes you’ll need to input the url again or just remove the # sign at the end. If all else fails start reboot the mother and start with a new page.
• You can add this beta version to your iPhone Home Screen by clicking the “+” on the browser and selecting “Add to my Home Screen” a SuperTwitter icon will be placed on your Home Screen and will be available anytime you want to check in.

As a beta tester we would appreciate your feedback in the comments of this blog post. Please feel free to tell us anything you like about the application, but we’d especially like to know how you feel about the display. Did you like the simple animation? What would make the image collage better? etc.

If you have a point of view on SuperTwitter it would be great for you to tweet about it too with the #supertwitter hashtag with a link to http://www.supertwitter.com - and if you aren’t already, you can follow us on … Twitter @supertwtr.

We’ll save a special spot in our SuperTwitter hearts for you who were the first to give it a try.

Many Thanks,

Jeff, Paul, George and Drew

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

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It looks like we’ll have a release for brave testers this week. We’ll be contacting those of you who signed up, or you can just follow us on… Twitter @supertwtr

We showed the app to some developers at the packed Silicon Valley iPhone Developers’ Meetup in Palo Alto last week and got some great feedback. Thanks to Tim Burks for his energy in organizing the Meetups.

On the visualization front (our favorite place), we’ve been toggling between 2 versions with distinct views that will  be merged into a melange of random visual surprises. Srsly. One version is authenticated and displays tweets from those you follow in a basic black and white display with the user picture. The other version is pulling random tweets from TwitGoo that have images referenced and are layered under the tweet. Jeff created a set of screen grabs on Flickr from the more visual version.

Paul has been rising before his lovely daughter Lilia wakes to optimize the database so you get all this goodness faster and more efficiently. Jeff is actually going to meet Paul this Friday for the first time since we started working on SuperTwitter. We haven’t seen each other in over a year and have been doing all of this work through Basecamp, Google Chat, and AIM. I think we spoke once by phone. Crazy.

George was feeling that the website was too dark and has been experimenting with a new home page. We’ll probably get that up in time for the app release. It does seem to more accurately tell the story of the waves of visual snips that you see in SuperTwitter. What do you think?

That should just about cover the news for this week. Thanks for your ongoing interest and if you want to see SuperTwitter in real-time let us know.

- Jeff, Paul, George, Drew and a few cheerleaders