Blog about (Web-) Programming, Graphics and Games.

18.01.2010

New project "Twaja"


Im working on a new project named Twaja. It will be a Twitter-client written in Java. The name is based on the words 'Twitter' and 'Java' and means 'Your' in russian.

There are a lot of twitterclients available, is there a need for another one? I currently use Echofon, which is comfortable and fast, but lacks some features I'd like to use. On the other hand there are other, more complex clients with more features, but they usually have a large footprint. Basically I havent found the ideal client for me, so I started to write an own. It will have the features, which I find important and it will have a small footprint.

It will be written in Java and will use the small jTwitter-api. It thus might run as an applet within a Website, but most likely as an Desktop-application (using Java Webstart). The Gui will not be based on Swing or SWT, but only on AWT, which has the smallest footprint. Here are some characterics and proposed unique features of Twaja:
  • Combine friends feed and search. While I like to follow tweets of my friends I sometimes also want to follow tweets regarding certains topics from everybody, which can be found through twitter-search, e.g. using tags. The client will be able to display both, friend feeds and search results in an equal way.
  • Ranking. Sometimes, when I was offline for a while, there are hundreds of unred tweets, which are uncomfortable to browse. There should be a form of ranking in the client, so that you e.g. can read tweets only from 'important' users..
  • Innovative display. I will try to implement some new display ideas. E.g. tweets with tags may be displayed grouped with Taglines. Thus one can easy distinguish between tweets of different topics. I wrote about the concept of taglines here.
Soon there will be more screenshots and infos available on Twaja. Stay tuned! :)

13.01.2010

O3D demo with skeletal animation

This demo shows skeletal, key-frame-based animation with Google O3D. All mesh- and animation data is stored within a html-file (~60kB) and processed via javascript. Only the texture is loaded from an jpg-file.