In the same vein, I signed up for Twitter to fall in behind other tech-enthusiasts everywhere. I posted occasionally, but tried to keep up with my friends’ activities more often. This was assisted by my Nokia N97 after purchasing a license for Gravity. This made using Twitter an absolute pleasure, and I found myself posting (slightly) more often and glancing at the updates from others throughout the day. However, I then shifted over to my Nokia N900, and its inability to run any Twitter apps even close to Gravity in quality and features…

I tried a number of apps written for the N900 – Mauku and Witter to name a couple. They did an OK job, but generally felt a bit clunky or scruffily presented. It then dawned on me that the N900 is designed to be ‘always connected’ and has a blindingly good web browser built in, so I tried out dabr. This site claims to be a ‘mobile web interface to Twitter’s API’, and it certainly succeeds at that. In the absence of Gravity it would have been a fantastic tool for use on my N96 or N97 in the past. For the N900, with the high resolution screen, the text was just too small and the links were far from finger-friendly.

It was at this point that I started to consider writing my own Twitter client. My development skills for Maemo are far from perfect, and I came to the conclusion I wanted something that I could use on multiple platforms anyway, so something web based seemed to be the way forward. I decided it would have to be finger friendly, but ideally in a way that wasn’t too intrusive when I used it from a desktop browser.

PHP and Javascript are my current languages of choice for web development, so I set to work on decyphering the Twitter API (not a difficult task) and exploring code examples for actually pulling data out of Twitter.

It was around this point where I happened upon TweetGo.net, which already seemed to do the basics of what I was planning – a finger friendly UI for Twitter. However, it’s also in its early stages, and lacks a few features that I’d like to see in a client – which would recreate a lot of the functionality and ease of use of Gravity.

And so, GaliTwit was born. You can check it out in current (also early) form by following this link, or from the link I’ll shortly add to the navigation bar at the top of this site. I’ll hopefully write some more posts about it in due course to cover what features it already supports, and what I plan to implement in the future.