Feathers for Facebook Credits

Dedication

For my wonderful parents, Haluk and Mehlika Balkan. Without your support none of this would be possible. I can't thank you enough.

Design

The adorable little birds on the main screen (and the little feather on the Feedback & Support screen) are from the Cute Twitters icon set by the extremely talented Mirjami Manninen. The icon set was commissioned and released by the ever-useful Smashing Magazine.

The original Feathers icon is by iPhone icon design guru Nicolas Thomsen of Apporacle. I modified it for Feathers for Facebook by giving a Facebook-blue tint and adding the Facebook-like "f" to differentiate it from the Feathers for iPhone (Twitter version of the) app.

Advice, help, and references

Most of the unicode collections in the Styles section are based on the ones at TwingDings.com with minor differences in the character sets where it was required for browser compatibility.

Many thanks to Wikipedia for providing me with The Morse code alphabet.

A big thank-you to Tom Morris for helping me out with the logic symbols and writing for me a summary of how he uses them.

Thanks also to Kat Lawlor for her advice on "symbols girls will love and use" :)

Many thanks to Paul van Dijk for showing me that I can link directly to the reviews in the App Store (I was previously sending users to the main page for the app.) To read more about App Store URL tricks, including that one, check out this useful Tuaw article.

1.1 Update: The 1337 style is based on the one from fUNICODE: The Ultimate Fun Text Generator with reference from the Wikipedia page on L33t and the Encyclopedia Dramatica page on Leet.

1.2 Update: The emoticon for :P (and the related joke emoticons) are based on the work of cartoonist and iPhone developer Tim Peckham. Check out his cartoons for the iPhone.

Feedback

Thanks to Danny Hope and Relly Annett-Baker for suggesting that the initial "Tap me…" thought bubble could be displayed on every launch until the user tweets (implemented in the 1.1 Update).

Thanks to Alexander Repty for suggesting that Feathers could warn users if they are about to tweet the default welcome message (implemented in the 1.1 Update).

Thanks to Katie Atkinson for suggesting the confused smiley – :s – in Magic Quotes (implemented in the 1.2 Update).

Thanks to Andy Warwick for reporting the lack of contraction support in magic quotes (implemented in the 1.2 Update).

Many thanks to all of you for posting your suggestions and questions on the support forums.

Code & Libraries

The Twitter functionality comes courtesy of MGTwitterEngine by Matt Gemmell.

RegexKitLite from John Engelhart is a gem. Easy-to-use, lightweight regular expressions for iPhone apps.

The KeyboardView category on UIApplication by Matt Gallagher lets me overlay progress indicators and button blockers/shades over the iPhone's keyboard.

Matt Gallagher's NSData+Base64 class makes it easy to do authenticated calls among other things that require Base64 encoding.

The SynthesizeSingleton class by Matt Gallagher is an easy way to create and use Singletons in Objective-C.

I use NSString+Helper (to check if a string contains a string without using RegEx, also has a handy md5 function) and UIAlertView+Helper (display a UIAlert with a single C function call) from the CocoaHelpers project by enormego developers.

The network reachability code is based on and contains code from Apple's iPhone Reachability sample application.

I decode XML entities in strings using code contributed by Daniel Dickison and Walty on StackOverflow.

SFHFKeychainUtils by Buzz Andersen (based partly on code by Jonathan Wight, Jon Crosby, and Mike Malone) makes it child's play to use the keychain on iPhone and keeps your Twitter password hidden from prying eyes.

I use several of enormego's excellent Cocoa-Helpers like NSString+Helper, which adds containsString and md5 methods to the NSString object and UIAlertViewHelper, which makes it dead simple to create an alert.

The ROT13 method comes courtesy of the NSStringCategory at CocoaDev.com.

Books, etc.

Many thanks to Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche for their Beginning iPhone Development book that got me off to a running start and to Aaron Hillegass of Big Nerd Ranch for his excellent Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X.

Matt Gallagher's Cocoa With Love site and Marcus S. Zarra and Matt Long's Cocoa is My Girlfriend have been and continue to be invaluable resources of Cocoa and iPhone wisdom.

StackOverflow by Joel Spolsky, Jeff Atwood, Jarrod Dixon, Geoff Dalgas, Brent Ozar, and Jeremy Kratz is a most excellent resource for all things programming-related.

Tools & workflow

Thank you, Apple, for making such lovely hardware and software and for your focus on User Experience. I've rediscovered the fun of computers thanks to you.

GitHub, Lighthouse, Tender, all integrated and working together beautifully. What can I say? It's an awesome time to be a developer! Big shout outs to the folks at Logical Awesome (hey Chris!) and entp.

I'd be lost without my trusty Photoshop, Illustrator, TextMate, and LittleSnapper.

Visor makes me feel cool every time I drop into Terminal and Zooom/2 does the same evey time I resize or move a window. Thank-you for making it more fun to use my Mac.

And... I couldn't start any of the above apps as easily without QuickSilver. I wouldn't want to use a Mac without it!

Thank you

To my friends — I appreciate your companionship, encouragement, and support more than you can know.