Twit-A-Dex Now on Android!

Twit-A-Dex


The Release


The link when it is finished publishing should be: Twit-A-Dex on Google Play

Tonight I spent some time working out the last kinks with the app and making some YouTube videos to finalize the marketing section of the Google Play. Overall I am happy with the first version of the application. It still needs Intent Filters and some services specific to Android, however I want to be able to come up with a nice way of generating services for both Android and IOS from an XML model of some kind.

3d Twitter App

Initially the idea was to make a unique Twitter application in 3d and publish it just to learn a bit more about Unity3d. Currently I feel like the feeling is there. I think it could feel a little more like Minority Report if I took into account the gyroscope more and made the user turn their body to see their tweets. That sounds really annoying though.

The Twitter API and Twitter4j

Reading about the Twitter API just about killed me when looking for easy ways to make the application work. First I wanted to interact with the API directly but found that in Unity sending across the proper data was a work around that did not always work... Something to do with oAuth and the exchange requiring a 0 byte array of data that did not end up working for me.

The most irritating thing about the application is the first thing the user sees... the log in  oAuth for apps is horrid. There really should be an Android and IOS embedded version of oAuth that would allow for log ins to be dictated by the phone... or something. Here is the tutorial video I attached to the application log in as a ? icon:

Ouch... right?

Why no IOS Version yet?

I had built a good chunk of the app and did not feel like abandoning it over Unity, I wrote a plugin for Unity to hook into a library called Twitter4j which worked out pretty well.

Since the plugin is most of the interaction with Twitter I will wait and see if it is wroth writing the bulk of the code required in Objective C. Unfortunately for the app I really want to go back to working on Games rather than spend the time converting the Twitter Interactions. 

With that said, IF 5 PEOPLE TELL ME THEY WANT IT ON IOS... ill probably do it.

Built in Unity3d



The cool thing about the application is that the whole thing is managed in 3d space. It was also the most difficult thing to manage with menus that I have experienced in a long time. 

Each button in the application is a 4 vertex plane with a texture surrounded by a clickable (or touchable) Physics Box. Each Tweet card as seen in the image above is a object made up of individual reply, re-tweet  favorite, and profile buttons. All managed and scaled to their local position and scale.

3d text was used to display the tweets which was a special pain in Unity3d (3.5) because of the lack of dynamic fonts. Each tweet is made up of 3d text with some ridiculous resolution, otherwise it just looks blurry.

Tween until you vomit!

Everything is either a tween, lerp or some other kind of transition over time. It looks really cool but for usefulness it just serves as a distraction for twitter load times. Which might not be a bad thing.

Google Play...

Publishing on Google Play seems to take longer for applications to become visible on the market. Odd... also when searching for my app, I constantly get redirected to Movies or Books >.< 

8 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. I'm on Android (GSGII) and I tested it all of a few minutes. I will look into it again as it has loads of potential. I need the noises to stop as clicking is a no-no. Also, I could not find a menu option to do things. What kind of things? Just things that menu buttons are created for. Yeah, those things. :-) And lastly, it froze my phone. I'm not sure if it was because I did not remove my prior Twitter client or not but there you have it.

    Will be watching this app for sure. And sorry your app ended up in Movies and Books. Hopefully it'll get the proper place if you're still developing with patience and more patience and Asian food. (saw your posts on Twitter)

    PS - AndroidCentral.com is where I found your app just is case you're wondering. They did an awesome listing of apps we know and apps we might want to know.

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  3. Hi, working on updates now. Adding Links and a Sound Toggle button.

    Thanks for the support!

    -Chris Lucian

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  4. Posted an update to toggle sound. More updates soon.

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  5. Great CL. Thanks for the follow-up. Will check back in on it soon.

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  6. Added ability to click links, in version 1.4. Up on Android Market Now!

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  7. Hey, Awesome App! I was wondering if you'd be interesting in doing a tutorial on how you created your plugin with twitter4j? I'm just having a tough time with this twitter stuff. Any help would be great. Thanks!

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  8. What are you trying to do with twitter. The only hard part about the plugin I think is getting large bits of data like 20 tweets from the plugin to Unity. All I did was take raw JSON from twitter4j and send it as a string to Unity. Then you convert the JSON to the objects you want to use in the app.

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