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Our Twitter application were featured on a Singapore local daily, MyPaper, yesterday.

Tweet easy, thanks to free S’pore applications

MyPaper, 16 Apr 2009

CHEN JINGTING

TWITTER fans here have created applications for fellow tweeting Singaporeans to “tweet” conveniently and securely – for free. These third-party applications are mainly for Twitter users who update their profiles via SMS. Tweet.sg, started by software engineer Jym Cheong about three months ago, has more than 700 users.

A user only has to send his password and message to a designated number. A program will then copy the SMS message onto his Twitter account online. “Tweet.sg updates the account on behalf of the user,” said Mr Cheong, who designed the program. The 33-year-old told my paper that he is not making money from tweet.sg. If a user has free SMS as part of his mobile-phone plan, he does not need to pay a cent when he uses tweet.sg, he said.

If the user exceeds his free SMS limit, charges are paid to the telecommunication companies, not tweet.sg.
So why did he start tweet.sg? To save money for local Twitter users, he said. Initially, users needed to send their SMSes to a number in the United Kingdom, which can incur expensive international SMS charges. A similar Singapore-based site, Widgeo.us, which provides web technology-based solutions, introduced its free Twitter application last October. Currently, nearly 700 fans are using the application. It stores and encrypts users’ passwords in its system to protect their privacy and prevent misuse of information, said co-founder Chua U-Zyn, 26. Tweet.sg also has its own security measures.

Mr Cheong said: “Once the SMS reaches the system, it is not stored and is sent to Twitter. Whether the attempt is successful or not, the system would delete the SMS so that no trace of it is left.” Mr Chua hopes that Widgeo.us would be able to access users’ online account information without requiring their login information in the future. “Then they don’t have to give us their passwords, which means greater security and user privacy.”

jtchen@sph.com.sg

Do check out our just-improved Twitter application.

Widgeous is currently undergoing some changes and you shall hear from us soon on our new updates!

Thanks for all your support!

Four months ago, we finally reached the finishing point at alpha. It was a long run. Yesterday, we reached closed beta and though it took less time then alpha, the complications and amount of work needed to get things up and running made the journey seem so long it made alpha look like a mere warm-up.

We switched directions after alpha and decided to completely focus our energy on the API and platform aspect of Widgeous. Initially, on top of our the platform, we planned to create an application that allows people to build applications that ride on the Widgeous platform using a drag and drop interface. Our goal was to make it so simple to use that even non-geeks can use it to create useful things. The goal was a huge one and eventually became huge enough that we decided we will not have enough resources to sustain a development term long enough for us to build something useful without compromises.

So here we are at closed beta, after a long road from alpha. Over the past four months, we introduced improvements to our development workflow. On top of our revision control system with Subversion, we added Trac as the bug/issue management system of choice. The need arose as we progressed further into development, more bugs and issues were discovered and it became increasingly difficult to manage them in ProjectPier, what we are using for collaboration. We are not saying ProjectPier is a bad software. We are still using it but for managing bugs, we needed something specialized. As we mostly work from home and only occasionally from the Widgeous office, we needed to communicate efficiently. We started using Yugma, a web-conferencing software that allows use to share screens and go over code and UI collectively, as if we are in an office. For voice discussions we use Skype.

The development phase towards closed beta went on overdrive as we approached May 21^st, which was yesterday, the planned launch date and also the day we had our first public presentation at BarCampSingaporeII. BarCampSingaporeII was organized by Barcamp Singapore, Singapore PHP User Group and Entrepreneur27 (Garag3) and was the first local community event sponsored by Google Singapore. Thus there was a silent tendency among us to want to impress. This motivated us greatly and though tickets are appearing in Trac at a rate faster than we were able to resolve them, we pulled through, albeit mistakes and incomplete parts. Think 37signals philosophy, it is better to build half a product than a half-ass product.

We started work in our office early in the morning. Everyone arrived at the office less late (haha!) than usual and started hacking and fixing. U-Zyn and Kah Wee was busy with clearing development-related tickets in Trac and Ridzuan was busy with his well-thought out presentation, while I was finding bugs and fixing UI issues. There was a real sense of teamwork within the team and everyone was high on spirits, though some of us had been working late nights prior to this day. I am really happy to be in this team.

Few hours before the 7PM event, we ran into some issues with the live server which required kernel-level updates and we had to switch between name servers for our development and live domain. We were almost disappointed that we couldn’t open up for registration because our DNS records for widgeo.us did not propagate in time due to the last-minute switch. We were supposed to set off to the event at 6PM but left many minutes after, when the site at widgeo.us finally went up.

On the way to the event in U-Zyn’s car, Kah Wee was still trying to get the “Floating Room” app (for our event presentation) to work, apparently affected by last minute changes to the code due to the server problem earlier. When we finally reached Park Mall, the event location, we had to climb several flights of stairs on foot as the lifts were packed full of sardines from the evening rush hour. Though our presentation was scheduled to be around 9PM, we had to be there early for registration. We found a fairly vacant room at the venue with a good connection to the net and plenty of power points and continued our work there. Chandrashekar Raghavan, BarCamp’s co-founder was with us in the room for some light-hearted chat. We were then joined by Sek Ling, U-Zyn’s girlfriend who took some good pictures of the event.

We managed to fix things and soon enough it was our turn to present in breakout session 2. Ridzuan gave an impressive and hurmorous presentation on the current state of communication and how Widgeous can simplify things, followed by U-Zyn’s presentation and demonstration of the capabilities of the Widgeous platform and API, with “Floating Room” as the example. I am glad everything turned out good. People quickly participated by logging on to the Floating Room as chatters and some even registered on the spot.

There were 2 breakout sessions. Chandra wanted the audiences of breakout session 1 to experience Widgeous so he got us to do another presentation, this time to an even bigger crowd. I was stoked to see that we are somehow the star of the show.

It was a great event and opportunity to showcase what we have done over the past months to people who matter. Thank you all, organizers, sponsors and attendees who contributed to the event and made it enjoyable and productive.

SgEntrepreneurs has a good overall coverage of the event and Ian too.

Many thanks to the following who featured us
Singapore Entrepreneurs

When I designed the Widgeous identity, I chose colors which represented the sky and greenery. These are colors that are comfortable to our eyes and thus the thought of idea of blue and green color themed wallpapers came to my mind. Having a nice and comfortable looking desktop is especially important for those who spend long hours in front of a computer screen. So here’s a selection of high resolution blue and green themed wallpapers from my favorite desktop resource.

Lazy Days II by boss019

Download

continued…

They were actually printed 2 months ago but I reckoned I’d show them here since we now have an official blog.

The logotype is set in a modified version of the well-known Sans Serif typeface — Helvetica™ Neue Std Medium ITC Franklin Gothic®, for a casual, relaxed appearance. The idea behind this business card design is to pack as much relevant (only relevant) information as possible into a compact card without clutter. I was able to do it by separating the various elements (logo, particulars, description, etc) into boxes and applying some clever typography principles. Colors are meant to be fresh and free from corporate cliché.

Readers, both imaginary and non-existent. I am excited to be the first to write on this blog. No, actually the others are all too busy with their work and I had just finish mine — designing and coding the theme for this blog. I have even bought a WordPress Navy Blue Hoodie to reward myself for the time I have spent with WordPress for the past one week.

I think it’s a nice and good-looking thing to wear since it’s getting cold here and I get to show people how much I love WordPress. Another thing about WordPress that gives me a good feeling is how each release is named after a famous jazz musician. I believe developers who love music and jazz are able to build genuinely good products with a passion like the kind they have for music. I have been using WordPress since version 1 and prior to that, b2\cafelog, its precursor.

For a quick introduction, I am Aen, the Art Director and UI Designer of Widgeo.us. Being the creative guy and a WordPress junkie, I designed the blog and made myself its blogmaster and now this blog is like my flesh and blood.

What is Widgeo.us? In a nutshell, it is a tool we are building to allow people to build tools which unify multiple communication channels into one central core. I know this description sounds rather vague and geeky and you can barely picture the actual product in your mind. If you want to know more, this blog is where you should be checking for news and updates. Subscribing to our RSS Feed is a good idea. You can also hop on to Widgeo.us and sign up our newsletter for a chance to become a beta tester.

This is my short introduction of the Widgeo.us blog. As for other stuff like development updates and Widgeo.us related news, I’ll leave it to U-Zyn and Kah Wee, the programmer guys and Ridzuan, our man in the suit, metaphorically speaking… I have never seen him wear one.

Updates

[Dec 21, 2007] We are on Web Creme!
[Dec 23, 2007] We are featured on W3C Sites as “Editor’s Pick”
[Dec 26, 2007] Featured on CSS Mania
[Others] CSS Designed Gallery, CSS Mess, Most Inspired, Link Creme, Ultimate CSS Gallery, Ala Brasil, Web Doctrine, My3W CSS Genius, The Daily Slurp, CSS Vault