tw.j1ck.com

You’ll get to a simple page where you can choose the appropriate version for your phone, click on the relevant link, and the app will be downloaded and installed on your phone. After this, we hope using the app is rather self-explanatory.

The font size of that page is too small on some phones (esp. Nokia), but there is not much we can do until we customize it for each phone. Rest assured, fonts in the app are big and readable! That is actually one of the main design goals of  j1ck.tweet and our whole system.

I hate feature lists. I think app design should be about the user experience. But of course not everybody thinks alike, and knowing whether some required functionality is supported is often useful. So here it goes, summary of j1ck.tweet features:

• All standard functionality: timeline, @mentions, DMs, favorites, following/followers, follow/unfollow, profiles… and of course tweeting!
• Simple, no-nonsense interface. Up/Down/Click and using a menu is all you need to know.
• Quick Reply / Retweet / Favorite in each tweet
• Trending Topics / Saved searches support
• Multiple-account support.
• Twitpic support: you’ll see the picture without having to navigate over there
• Camera support! Take a snapshot from the tweeting form itself and have it automatically uploaded to Twitpic. Great to share where you are in a moment.
• Pretty good support for touch-screen phones (we’re testing mainly on Nokia 5800 and Samsung F480)
• Support for QWERTY keyboard phones (Nokia E71 is currently our main testing device for this)

Here is an (incomplete) list of phones where we’ve tested this to work fine:

Nokia N70, Nokia N73, Nokia N80, Nokia N81, Nokia N95, Nokia E50, Nokia 6230, Nokia 6288, Nokia 6500, Nokia 5610 XpressMusic, Nokia 5220 XpressMusic, Nokia 2630, Nokia 3109c, Nokia 3120 Classic, Nokia 5800, Sony-Ericssson W880i, Sony-Ericssson K610i, Sony-Ericssson Z610i, Sony-Ericssson K800i, Samsung SGH-U700, Samsung SGH-J800, Samsung SGH-i560, Samsung SGH-L760, Samsung SGH-F480 (touch-screen), LG KU-380, LG KU-800, Motorola RAZR V3, Motorola VE 538

Temporarily, it won’t work on the Nokia 6020/6021, which are quite old and where app size is limited to 128kb (!). We plan to reduce the size back to let it work again on this phones, but we haven’t had the time to do so yet.

All feedback will be very welcome (that’s the goal!). Just write to support@j1ck.com. We hope to use this public beta to start testing the scalability of our server (which, for obvious reasons, hasn’t yet been tested “on the wild”), and compatibility with as many phones as possible. But still, we’ve already been using this ourselves for weeks, and we are already enjoying it a lot, and I hope you will too!

These are all people that will enjoy Twitter or other online apps, if only we can make it easy for them. And this is the reason why J1CK has been designed to reach all audiences: our software works well in any feature phone provided it has the basic Java support.

Don’t get me wrong, we also love to make the best of the most advanced features, such as touch screens or full QWERTY keyboards (see my previous post http://j1ck.com/blog/2009/09/17/j1ck-twitter-client-for-java-phones/, featuring the Nokia E71 and 5800, and the Samsung F480). We’re also going to release Blackberry and iPhone versions of our software (at the very least). But we believe that given the current mobile landscape, it’s critical for many goals to reach 90%+ of users, and this requires great support of a wide gamut of devices.

Apart from this, and for some reason I’ve never really been able to understand, I *love* software working on tiny devices. Seeing old computers gives me a kick, and I felt a surge of dopamine the day I saw our software work on a tiny 128×128 pixels screen on a Nokia 6020. I was trying our Wikipedia browser, and it just felt weird and great. It’s something like bloggin with ink on a papyrus. It feels dissonant, but just great!

Here are a few captures of j1ck.tweet, our Twitter client, running on a tiny Nokia 6085, with a tiny 128 x 160 pixels screen. The nice part is that it works great, you can even take pictures when tweeting and have then uploaded to Twitpic, and it overall makes for a great Tweeting platform!

And, apart from the basic functionality above, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t enjoy all the functionality of an advanced Twitter client:

• Twitpic preview
• Multiple account support
• Quick links to DM/Reply/Retweet/Favorites
• Follow/Unfollow/Followers/Following/Profiles
• Saved searches, Trending topics, and more!

And finally, as another example of a basic phone, here are a few captures of the LG KU 380.

The fonts LG installed on this phone are quite ugly. But, hey, Twitter works perfectly here! And keep this in mind, these are some of the most basic phones out there.

Next week, I think I’ll post some screenshots from the Blackberry version.

And we should be able to actually release the first public beta soon!

So, our Twitter client is almost ready for 1.0 prime time. We’ve been doing some closed beta testing – there are a couple of features which need a bit of work yet, but we’ll probably be able to release this in one or two weeks.

We’ve tried to cover all standard functionality, and add a few advanced features as well. Here’s a short summary:

• All standard functionality: timeline, @mentions, DMs, favorites, following/followers, follow/unfollow, profiles… and of course tweeting!
• Quick Reply / Retweet / Favorite in each tweet
• Trending Topics / Saved searches support
• Simple, no-nonsense interface. Up/Down/Click and using a menu is all you need to know.
• Multiple-account support.
• Twitpic support: you’ll see the picture without having to navigate over there
• Camera support! Take a snapshot from the tweeting form itself and have it automatically uploaded to Twitpic. Great to share where you are in a moment.
• Pretty good support for touch-screen phones (we’re testing mainly on Nokia 5800 and Samsung F480)
• Support for QWERTY keyboard phones (Nokia E71 is currently our main testing device for this)

A couple other important features will be coming soon with 1.1. Please let us know which ones you’d like to see, anyway!

And here are a few screenshots (from the Samsung F480):

These are on a Nokia 5800 (the large screen allows a lot of content to be shown – click for the full-size version!):

And here it is how it looks on the Nokia E71, which has a landscape form factor screen to make room for the QWERTY keyboard:

Compatibility

We’re of course aiming at being compatible with all common Java phone models, but these are the ones we use almost daily: Nokia: N80, 5800, 5220 XpressMusic, N95, Sony-Ericsson W880i, Samsung F480, Motorola VE 538. This should be a good sampling of phones out there. Here’s a partial list of phones where we’ve tested our apps to work correctly:

Nokia N70, Nokia N73, Nokia N80, Nokia N81, Nokia N95, Nokia E50, Nokia 6020, Nokia 6021, Nokia 6230, Nokia 6288, Nokia 6500, Nokia 5610 XpressMusic, Nokia 5220 XpressMusic, Nokia 2630, Nokia 3109c, Nokia 3120 Classic, Nokia 5800, Sony-Ericssson W880i, Sony-Ericssson K610i, Sony-Ericssson Z610i, Sony-Ericssson K800i, Samsung SGH-U700, Samsung SGH-J800, Samsung SGH-i560, Samsung SGH-L760, Samsung SGH-F480, LG KU-380, LG KU-800, Motorola RAZR V3, Motorola VE 538

We’ll be working to make sure we are compatible with most phones in the future.

We have a Blackberry port too (not in J2ME mode, but as a native Blackberry app) which is working quite nicely. There are a few things we have to fix yet before we can release it, but expect a Blackberry version available soon too. And other platforms will come shortly too!

Follow us at @j1ck for news!