If you’re running the beta version of Skype 2.8 for Mac OS X, you can now integrate the new mood message chat with your Twitter account.
It’s very much experimental – it’s just one way, in as much as you can only post your current mood message to Twitter.
Enabling it will need you to be comfortable editing XML files by hand. To get started you’ll need to edit:
~/Library/Application Support/Skype/<username>/config.xml
…and then add the following to areas underneath the UI ยป General nodes:
<TwitterPassword>mypassword</TwitterPassword>
<TwitterUsername>mytwitterusername</TwitterUsername>
You can grab the full details on the Skype Developer Zone.
Whilst it’s still fresh in my mind, here are a bunch of notes I collaborated on using SubEthaEdit at today’s Carson Systems hosted The Future of Web Apps summit held in London today.
Further and more detailed notes from these and the later afternoon sessions are available at Steve Marshall’s site.
Read the rest of this entry »
Web app immedi.at takes a RSS or Atom feed specified by the user (selected via a small bookmarklet) and then sends alerts to the IM application of your choice when the feed is updated. Currently AIM, MSN Messenger, Jabber and ICQ are supported.
At first glance, the idea is awesome, although it might get a little bit overkill with some more popular sites – say Slashdot or BBC News, but it does do exactly what it says on the tin.
However, the killer app might just be a combining it with a keyword based feed such as my earlier Yahoo! News over RSS article, alerting you to stories from multiple sources based on topics of your choice.
Currently the service appears to pick up its feeds via autodetecting the URL’s in the selected site’s meta tags, but with a little tweaking it might not be too difficult to point it in the direction of a XML file. (The system is very much in beta right now, so the functionality might well appear in the coming weeks nonetheless.)
Google appeared to have quietly launched a beta of their groundbreaking maps service for the UK, with most of the features of it’s US counterpart intact (with the notable exception of detailed satellite maps).
So now, you can find your way to your favourite football team, check out local pubs and of course, most importantly discover how to make your way from one end of the country to another.
To coincide, with this, it appears that the UK native version of Google’s Local search has also arrived in beta form with results provided by Yell.com.
Update: Looks like myGMaps.com works perfectly well with the UK version too for creating your own custom maps. Neat.
Well, like a dork, I didn’t actually realise that Yahoo! News already offered up the whole RSS feeds for news keywords thing when I started. However, the fun thing of course with the API that Yahoo! are offering is that it doesn’t take a whole lot of time to create another script that dishes out the same thing in another ‘rival’ syndication format:
Atom enabled Yahoo! web feeds examples
The syntax of the URL is almost identical to that of the RSS feed http://undercrank.com/yahoo/atom/news/«keywords» (the equivalent RSS version would be http://undercrank.com/yahoo/rss/news/«keywords». This is a slight change to the previous syntax posted, but the old format is still perfectly valid and won’t break for those already using it.
As before, the feed validates nicely has good friendly HTTP caching facilities built in, as as a special bonus it conforms to the Tag URI recommendations pretty well too.
Use is made of the extended Author tags for each article, and support for multiple languages for each entry is available – although it appears that Yahoo! returns “en” as the language for everything, even, if it’s not.
Finally, I’ll post up the source once I’m convinced I’m doing everything the ‘right’ way.
