Not that it iPad friendly wasn’t before, in fact Hahlo ran perfectly fine on the iPad, but with that extra screen space available it would be silly to not make use of it, wouldn’t it? All up it isn’t a massive update, but some good bits and pieces have been thrown in.
If you left your laptop at home but need something that’s not stored in the cloud, you can always use remote desktop access to view your primary machine through your iPad. Microsoft Remote Desktop is a free, easy-to-use iOS app that makes remote access simple just like when using business tools including this printable w2 form which works great with all employees.

With powerful apps loaded on your iPad, best network for business, the right accessories and remote desktop access, your iPad transforms from a basic tablet into a robust business tool.

Presentations on the go
The new iPad Pro includes a USB-C port, so you can connect to thousands of applications and systems that support this type of adaptor, including presentation systems. This means you can work on presentations and present them without having to lug your laptop to a client’s location. This added use on such a portable and light-weight device like iPad is ideal for traveling professionals.

What’s New

• iPad specific changes
  • Custom landscape layout with menu visible on the left (see screenshot above)
  • Portrait mode retains the ‘traditional’ Hahlo overlay menu accessed from the ‘menu’ button in the header.
  • Slightly larger navigation tabs
  • Bigger maps (640×480) on the geo-location pages
  • Custom iPad startup image when you add Hahlo to your home screen
  • New 72px home screen icon for the iPad
• Added ‘Retweeted by’ links (similar to ‘in reply to’) to all three retweet timelines
  • These allow you to quickly see who else has retweeted that specific tweet
  • Currently shows a maximum of 10 users (I may increase this in the future)
• Added all three retweet timelines to the menu (Retweeted to Me, Retweeted by Me, Retweets of Me)
• Using Twitter provided location data (for locations in the US), other locations are still using the google Maps API.
• Added link on geo-location pages to open the current location in Google Maps (will work on iPhone and iPad)

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a link parsing bug where links that omitted http:// would be linked incorrectly, this has now been fixed for links that begin with www but still omit http://

3 comments

I figured now was as good a time as any to push out the 4.1 update, even if I didn’t manage to get everything into it that I had originally hoped. The end of the year snuck up on me – I should have been paying more attention to that. I’ll add in the ‘missing’ features sometime in the new year. But, I hear you ask, what IS in Hahlo 4.1. Well…

Lists

You can check out the lists you’ve created, the lists you’re following and the lists that others tweeple have added you too. It’s totally awesome. You can also check out what lists other people follow/belong to from their profiles (more on that shortly). You can add people to your lists, and remove them should the need arise. The only thing(s) I haven’t added yet are the ability to create brand-spanking new lists or delete old lists from within Hahlo, for the moment you’ll have to do that on twitter.com.

Retweets

Personally I love the new retweet system but I’ll save my long winded explanation/rant for another time and place. In 4.1 I’ve added support for the various retweet timelines that twitter has made available, these include “Retweeted to me” ie. things the people you follow have retweeted, “Retweeted by me” should be self explanatory, and my personal favourite “Retweets of me”. I like this because it gives me an indication about which crap I tweet that actually interests people. Twitter has a few small tweaks planned for the retweet api which should allow me make these timelines even better in the future.

But what about the act of retweeting itself, well that’s dead simple. Just tap on a tweet, and then tap the “RT” button that appears, you’ll be asked to confirm the retweet and then you’re done. Easy. Awesome.

User profiles/timelines

With some of the changes that have happened to the API since 4.0 was released I can now combine the profile and archive/user timeline into a single page, meaning its easier for you to get to a users details AND their tweets at the same time. All you need to do is tap on the ‘Show Profile’ link in the top right on a user timeline and the profile will slide out.

You can also get this profile on the friend and follower lists, as well as on the lists of subscribers/members for any list. Within this slide out profile you’ll also get a couple of options (as shown in the screenshot above) to follow/unfollow the specified user, or to add them to one of your lists, or to block them. I’ll probably add a “report as spam” function in there somewhere in the next update.

Geotag your tweets

First up I should mention that for geotagging to work you will need to have enabled it in you settings on twitter.com – as far as I can see this isn’t an option that you can set/change via the api just yet.

Once you’ve done that you can also choose to set it so that Hahlo will automatically append you current location to your tweets by heading to the Hahlo settings page and turning on “always add geolocation” (this is off by default). If you choose not to turn this option on you can still add location on a tweet-by-tweet basis just by tapping the ‘add location’ link that is in the bottom right corner of the update box (you can also tap ‘remove location’ to do exactly that).

You might also notice that occasionally the location that is return is a bit wonky, unfortunately the Google Maps api (which I’m leveraging to get the ‘human readable’ location) doesn’t alwasy return the best results for the latitude/longitude combo that I pass to it. Because its actually the coordinates that are passed to twitter, and not this text version, things should be ok, but please let me know if any really weird shit happens… it probably will…

Tweet actions – “The tweet tray”

One of the biggest UI changes in 4.1 is the ‘tweet tray’. This replace the two slide-in-from-the-side menus that were added in 4.0. The reason for this is that the old style didn’t allow for enough future expansion. Strangely this ‘tray’ style is something that I had in an early version of 4.0 before switching the the left and right slide in style. I think this new style works better.

To get to the tray all you need to do, just like before, is to tap anywhere on a tweet and it will appear below said tweet. Easy. Depending on which timeline you are viewing you’ll see a bunch of options. Using the above screenshot as reference I’ll quickly run though the ones you’ll see and what they do. Ok?

• Speech bubble icon – takes you to the combined profile/timeline for the author of the tweet that you’ve selected.
• @ icon – opens the ‘tweet’ box ready to send an @ reply (or mention) to the selected user
• RT icon – to retweet the selected tweet, you’ll be asked to confirm that you want to retweet it to your followers (just like on twitter.com)
• Star icon – add this tweet as a favorite
• DM icon – open the ‘message’ box ready to send a direct message to the author of the selected tweet
• Location icon – this one is only visible if the selected tweet has location info attached (and you’ve got it turned on). Tapping this takes you to a page which will shown you on a map where the tweet was sent from (see below).

Find users

A new search feature added in 4.1 is the ability to search for other twitter users. Whether you’re searching for someone to follow, someone you know, someone you’re already following or someone you’d like to block the new “find user” feature should be helpful. Might be a nicer way to find a specific follower, as opposed to trawling through pages of usernames in your follower lists.

Tweets with location data

Whenever you spot a tweet with a location attached you can checkout exactly where that tweet was sent from by tapping the location icon in the tweet tray (see above). You’ll get to see a nice google map of exactly where John Doe was when they tweet that they were walking their dog. Yeah… a little stalker-ish, but remember they chose (or at least should have) to add that data to their tweet.

Coming in 2010 to cinema near you…

Like I said there were a few things that didn’t quite make it in time for 4.1, but I’ll look at those in the new year. Heres a peak at whats in store.

• Add/delete lists
• Tweetmeme info for links in tweets
• Tweetmeme popular links/topics etc
• Location based trends (once api is available)
• …and more (twitter keep adding new features so you never know what might be next)

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Just like Hahlo 4.1 he’s not quite finished, but I thought I’d show him off anyway. I’ve managed to go two and half years without creating a bird mascot/icon for Hahlo, and I had one planned for the release of v4, but just couldn’t get it to a point where I was happy with it. Sure this doesn’t add any new functionality to Hahlo, but that isn’t the point.

While I’m also talking about 4.1 I should give you a quick list of what to expect.

• Support for the new Retweet API, including each of the three retweet timelines (Retweeted to me, Retweeted by me and Retweets of me)
• Support for the new ‘home’ timeline, same as current friends timeline but includes Retweets.
• Support for the geolocation/geotagging api, which may or may not be live when 4.1 goes out.
• Support for Lists – view your lists, the lists you are following the lists that are following you, add people to lists, create new lists, and more.
• Tweetmeme support, better twitter trends (if new api is active in time) and much more…

If you’ve got a suggestion, or found a bug that needs to be squashed, now is the time to let me know so I can try and take care of it in 4.1

5 comments