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The Surfin' Safari blog announced SquirrelFish today, a new javascript interpreter for WebKit that is 1.6 times faster than the current interpreter. This is incredible, as Safari is already a super-fast browser, but as John Gruber points out in Daring Fireball, it may mean improved JavaScript support for the iPhone. If you've read much of this blog, you already know my opinion about the whole "JavaScript on the iPhone really sucks" thing. I was recently reminded of this when translating some jQuery/JSONscripting from the Web to the iPhone. What ran as a fairly simple and speedy app on the Web became unusable on the iPhone, and I had to strip out tons of code to get even basic functions up to speed. Keep your fingers crossed that SquirrelFish makes it to the iPhone, and soon! I'm not sure if its release so close to the WWDC conference means it won't be making it to the upgraded "iPhone 2" that everyone is expecting to be announced, or if an iPhone software update will be released after the new iPhones hit the market. The sooner the better! The creators of SquirrelFish say this is just the beginning...

Twitter has decided to remove a certain call from their API that the iTweet 2 private beta relied on to create the "ticker" effect that kept it updating at nearly real-time speeds.  The rate limit for API calls also remains handicapped, cut to 30 per hour from the usual 70.  This makes using Twitter API tools extremely inconvenient, and developing them is also quite frustrating. For now I have removed the "ticker" feature and the friends timeline will refresh every 140 seconds, though this number may be adjusted slightly as I attempt to keep the page open and in use today.  (Big thanks to all my helpful beta testers for your excellent feedback on the last iTweet 2 development cycle!)  Further development on the beta will continue when the API rate limit returns to normal.  Until then, Twitter API development is a waste of time as most people seem to be ditching API apps for the non-limited Web site. This is actually a good thing for me, as I am working hard on developing some other tools for The Illusion Factorythat I will be posting more about soon. Apologies for the lack of updates recently, I've been...

There's a great new Twitter service called Tweet Clouds, that will make a word cloud out of your Twitter timeline.  Here's mine: It's neat to see which words jump out. Some are obvious (iTweet, iPhone) but I am surprised at the weight of a couple words ("new" is one of the biggest words, I don't know what that's all about).  It also shows the people that I converse with the most and that's kind of cool to see. I also like that "love" and "lt3" are right next to each other - "lt3" being how Tweet Clouds reads "less-than-three" <3 hearts. This is an inventive and useful way of analyzing the content of your Twitter posts.  Kudos to John Krutsch for the scripting and Jared Stein for the design. You can see my full-size Tweet Cloud here. You can follow my Twitter updates here, my Twitter handle is @colbypalmer.

Tags: twitter, tweetcloud, colbypalmer

There's no shortage of Twitter clients out there that will work well on your iPhone. Twitter even offers its own: m.twitter.com. But iTweet takes the cake for us. The client offers a great UI, and most importantly, the ability to download only new tweets each time you refresh, saving a lot of time and bandwidth if you're using AT&T's snail-slow EDGE data network.

I just saw this really nice mention of iTweet,  my Twitter UI and iPhone web app, here on Wired.com's Epicenter blog. Thanks guys! (This article contains a voting system for "best app". If you enjoy using iTweet, please visit this page and click the green "UP" arrow to vote for iTweet!) I've also received a few requests now for a BlackBerry version of iTweet. I have never made a BlackBerry app before but how hard can it be, right? I will try to create a BB iTweet as soon as possible for those of you who don't have iPhones yet. ;) In other iTweet news, I'm working on a complete rewrite of the desktop app (and the iPhone app pending a review of the upcoming iPhone SDK). It's lean, mean, and Ajaxy. My favorite...

I recently had a client ask me to adjust her site to be iPhone-compatible.  The navigation of this site uses Flash to apply a cosmetic animation on the text, so her site wasn't navigable via iPhone or any other non-Flash equipped device. At first I thought I would advise her to forget about the slight effect that the Flash provided and change to a non-animated, but fully accessible navigation system.  But I knew she really liked this small detail of the site, so I thought I would try another way. ...are you using swfObject to embed your Flash content, anyway? Because you probably should be.  swfObject is an  XHTML-valid javascript  method of displaying Flash content without using unwieldy tags.  The script will fill any old