Third-party Twitter apps have access to nearly all of Twitter's functions. Even the new lists feature and the new retweet format can be supported by any ambitious developer. It's sort of strange then, that Twitter's people search is just now getting an API.

Now that this missing API is finally here, the ability to search for users should be popping up in your favorite Twitter program very soon. "Find people" on Twitter's site works by search both name and username, which is something apps couldn't achieve with the (admittedly very handy) "go to user " function.

If you're a curious developer, go check out the official announcement on Twitter's API announcements list.

We've all been there; we've got a problem with our server, laptop, PC, website, or blog, and have tried to solve it for hours with no success. At some point, we reach that point where we're absolutely certain that it's just some dumb thing that we're overlooking or forgetting to check. If you've ever found yourself in that situation, you'll probably want to bookmark a list of dumb things to check.

It's a list of (now 36) stupid things to check that you may have overlooked, compiled by Tom Limoncelli with input from members of the SAGE-Members mailing list. For anyone that hasn't found themselves in this situation, it will seem like a ridiculous concept. But for those of you out there that have been there, I bet you're thinking "awesome" like I am.

So, what's missing from the list? What's your best troubleshooting tip? Let us know in the comments.

Not being pretty and white, nor slender, shiny and fashionable, the BlackBerry devices don't get as much attention as its SoCal sister the iPhone.

But that doesn't mean the clever folks over at RIM aren't busy developing and releasing exciting new technologies for their latest OS 5.0 devices! You just don't hear about them quite so often, which I hope to rectify with this little bit of news. As covered by our clever cousins over at Engadget, you can expect the following additions and changes to soon become available:

• Open GL ES support -- this is the big one. This is the single change which will see the BlackBerry shift away from the black-straight-edged-suits and more towards the cool-chic-students. The developer kit is already out, so games makers should really get on to that right now...!
• Extensive Adobe technology support -- not only will we be seeing great Flash support (as covered by Engadget Mobile previously), there will also be more integration with rest of the Adobe Creative Suite.
• And much more -- the BlackBerry Payment Service, Theme Studio, and Advertising Service will all make an appearance at the end of 2009 or beginning of 2010.

These changes should cover all Storm and Curve owners, along with anyone that's lucky enough to own a Storm2!

So what does the iPhone do that the BlackBerry devices don't?

Does RIM really have to release a white-plastic-and-aluminum BlackBerry...?

In BIG news -- really, this is the kind of thing that could change the landscape of casual and indie games for ever (and for good!) -- the Unreal Developer Kit (UDK) is now available from Nvidia.

The Unreal Engine has historically been very hard to get your hands on with large license fees and other barriers to entry. And now, just like that, it's being made freely available to everyone. Whether for educational or non-commercial purposes, or to make your own commercial game, you can now use the UDK and get started with the fun bit -- the game creation -- immediately.

The catch? For non-commercial purposes: there is none. Students and those of you that are quietly working away on the next Big Thing in a garage or basement somewhere -- REJOICE!

For commercial developers: it'll cost you 25% of your royalty on any revenue revenue over $5,000 (see the full licensing details for more info).

And for everyone else -- the gamers! -- be ready for a lot more Time-Waster games powered by the Unreal Engine in the next few months!

Facebook Chat has been a bit slow to catch on. Since it's been relegated to being opened from the web in a Facebook Tab, it hasn't been able to compete with chat services that have their own dedicated clients, like AIM, MSN and Yahoo. Although some third-party apps - like Adium - have made the extra effort to support Facebook Chat, it's not widespread. That's about to change, though, when Facebook adopts XMPP and becomes compatible with tons of existing chat apps.

XMPP is most famous as the protocol behind Google Talk. That means any chat program that currently includes Google Talk will be able to include Facebook Chat too. Facebook, like Google, is starting out in the chat market with the advantage of huge pre-existing contact lists - for Google, it was your Gmail contacts, and for Facebook it's, well, Facebook. If you've ever wished you could just automatically add all of your Facebook buddies to your favorite IM program, you're in for a treat.

[via GigaOM]

Flickr has an open and very powerful API that's been around since 2004. Five years later, developers have built an enormous number of great apps and cool toys for Flickr. Now you can browse and discover Flickr apps in one central location, the new App Garden. Apps in the garden range from stats to importing/exporting to integration with other sites.

Although Flickr has chosen some featured apps to display prominently on the front page, any developer can submit to the App Garden. The Garden itself isn't the only place apps are being promoted around Flickr. On each photo page, along with the info you regularly see, you'll now see which app the photographer used to upload the image - as long as it's an app has already been submitted and listed by Flickr. If you're a developer, you have plenty of incentive to submit your app, and if you're a Flickr power user, you'll definitely want to check out what's already been posted.

[via Flickr Blog]

The story of how NewsGator attempted to corner the market on consumer RSS has taken another strange turn. In an interview with Steven Hodson published on Hodson's Shooting at Bubbles site, Bradbury admits that he is no longer employed by NewsGator, but has retained the full rights to his popular FeedDemon RSS reader. NewsGator continues to offer FeedDemon, and the application is still NewsGator-branded, but the clear implication here is that NewsGator no longer owns the rights to the most popular native Windows RSS feed reader.

It's no secret that NewsGator almost single-minded focus on capturing the lucrative enterprise market allowed its efforts in the consumer space to falter, ultimately leading to NewsGator shutting down their once-popular NewsGator Online feed reader, having conceded the online feed reader battle to Google's upstart Google Reader, which has iterated faster, and performing better than NewsGator's online reader for a few years.

It's unfortunate that NewsGator has given up on this market. While it's certainly true that Google has a powerful and successful product on its hands, there is certainly room in the RSS space for more than one dedicated company. What this means for FeedDemon's Mac equivalent, NetNewsWire remains to be seen, but since NewsGator's current push for more enterprise business relies on the talents of Brent Simmons, NetNewsWire will likely remain a NewsGator property for the foreseeable future.

Whether that is good news or not is anyone's guess.

UPDATE: The previous headline of this post turned out to be incorrect, as Nick Bradbury points out in the comments. The relationship between FeedDemon, NewsGator and Bradbury is a bit confusing, but what he said in the interview was this: "I'm no longer employed by NewsGator. FeedDemon remains a NewsGator-branded product, but I'm 100% in charge of it now, and I'm once again an indie developer. FeedDemon is my sole focus – and my sole source of income." So, NewsGator owns FeedDemon, Bradbury works on FeedDemon, but Bradbury does not work FOR NewsGator any longer.

Bradbury also pointed us to a post by NewsGator's Greg Reinacker, explaining more about where things stand.

If you use Adobe AIR apps on a regular basis, you have a lot to look forward to in AIR 2.0. The next version of Adobe's cross-platform app framework adds a bunch of little tweaks and a few major ones, including support for multitouch and gestures. Maybe even more importantly, AIR apps now won't suck up your CPU cycles and memory at such an absurd rate. A full list of upcoming features was just posted by AIR developer Chris Cantrell.

I've run into a lot of people who choose not use AIR apps because of their memory-hogging tendencies, and the improved performance in AIR 2 - depending on how improved it is - might go a long way toward getting more people to adopt the framework. Meanwhile, folks whose machines support multitouch and gestures will start to see new apps that take advantage of zooming, rotating and more. Other less-flashy features include audio recording and opening files in their default applications.

My favorite assessment of AIR comes from Tweetie developer Loren Brichter: "AIR apps are like modern day Java applets ... sure, they run on every platform. But they also suck on every platform." Hopefully, AIR 2.0 will prove him wrong. A beta is coming later this year, with a full release in early 2010.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

In rather exciting (though perhaps predictable) news, Google has announced that there will be an official Wave App Store!

There are still very few people using Wave, but hopefully you've all watched the Wave technology demo and been suitably impressed, or even dribbled a little if you're like me.

I'm sure as the codebase solidifies and bugs are ironed out, we'll begin to see a lot more invites, and eventually a public beta. With the Google Wave App store announced, I would expect to see some more developers jump on the bandwagon too -- perhaps jumping ship (or at least splitting their attention) from the iPhone App Store.

It would seem that the industry -- the service, web application and game sectors -- are starting to realise the power of user-generated and small-developer-generated content. Gone are the days of Windows or Space Invaders being developed in someone's garage or basement. But in its place, we have more easily-extensible and open frameworks than ever before. We can expect to see very exciting things from Wave and its App Store.

[via theNextWeb]

A key part of interface design is an exercise known as "wireframing." In this design phase, elements of an interface are blocked out roughly to show relative placement, interaction, and functionality. It is a rapid way to talk through functional requirements of a project and get buy-in from stakeholders without having to waste a lot of time on visual design that won't remain in a finished product.

Mockflow is a flash-based, online, collaborative wireframing tool for Web and Software designers. It contains a fairly complete set of wireframe elements and icons for use in your wireframe with flexible customizability of all the elements. The killer app of the tool is it's ability to collaborate in real-time with other team members online. Very, very useful for distributed teams.

I tend to use Adobe Fireworks for all my wireframing (and everything else) but a coworker pointed me toward this tool and it captured my attention. I find flash-based tools distasteful, they always feel slow to me, but this one was simple enough, with enough features to make it compelling to use. Definitely the right tool for the right situation.

The basic version is free, but ad supported and you are limited to two collaborators. Upgrading (introductory price of $49 / year) grants you unlimited collaborators and projects, is ad-free, and gives you 500 MB of storage. Definitely worth a look for distributed Web teams.

The flash-based tool will render a page in recent versions of the most used browsers, and will let you view an image of the rendered page one at a time, side by side (2-up view) or my personal favorite, onion skin view, which stacks two images from two different browsers on top of each other and gives you a slider to adjust translucency back and forth so you can see just how horribly Internet Explorer renders your page elements relative to every other modern browser.

The service is currently free and I expect that I will be using it quite heavily.

At the time of writing, the supported browsers are:

• Firefox 2.0 - Windows XP - version 2.0.0.18
• Firefox 3.0 - Windows XP - version 3.0.4
• Internet Explorer 6.0 - Windows XP - version 6.0.3790.3959
• Internet Explorer 7.0 - Windows XP - version 7.0.5730
• Internet Explorer 8.0 - Windows XP - version 8.0.6001.18702
• Safari 3.0 - OS X - version 3.2.3
• Safari 4.0 - OS X - version 4.0.3
• Firefox 2.0 - OS X - version 2.0.0.18
• Firefox 3.0 - OS X - version 3.0.4

My buddy Dave once shared with me a bit of computing wisdom which I've since found invaluable.

"Proper troubleshooting requires a Teddy Bear."

As it was told to me -- long ago in a university computer lab not so far away -- there was a sysadmin who became frustrated with the number of questions he was asked by student developers. It wasn't that the questions were invalid, or that the students weren't thinking them through. Rather, his frustration was with questions which found their own answers.

Students seeking his help would begin to explain the problem they were working on. More often than not, they wouldn't finish explaining before having an "Aha!" moments; That tiny moment of clarity every developer, admin or desktop analyst seeks as a part of their job.

Being forced to explain the problem had some effect which thinking about the problem alone didn't. How can you achieve the same mind-altered state without bugging the sysadmin, or taking a handful of Adderol and Xanaax*?

The weary sysadmin found a brilliant solution. He attached a teddy bear to his desk, and forced anyone who wanted to ask him a question to address the bear and explain the problem.

So, the next time you're halfway through asking a collegue a question and find yourself saying, "Wait, I think I just got it, never mind!", remember to thank them for being your teddy bear.

* Download Squad does not condone the abuse of Adderol, Xanaax or any other prescription drugs. Just sayin'.

I've read about using candles as a replacement for your Wii's sensor bar before, but what about the other end of the gaming input equation?

Say what? The controller. How about using the candle as a controller?

Who gives a crap if there's a slight risk of spilling a little hot wax on your hand during game play? No real man cares, that's for sure. In fact, the possibility of sustaining minor burns should make you want to play all the more.

Here's the gist of the game: a firefly has lost his luminescence. Since the little bug is attracted to light, you guide him through a series of caverns using a candle - which is tracked by your webcam. The game features awesome low-fi, pixelated graphics and original ambient music - also created by the developer.

This baby may never hit store shelves, but that wasn't the goal anyway. From the description on the YouTube page, the aim was "to show that you can use quite a medieval tool to control a game, and one that you can get for 35636575 times cheaper than Wiimote."

I don't know about you, but I'd like to see this released just so I can phone EB and ask them if they have any candles in stock. Either that, or I'll start keeping bees so I can make my own controllers.

[via Geek.com]