Twitter provides phone numbers to allow you to update your status via SMS. Unfortunately, local numbers are only available in a few countries: the US, Canada and India. Elsewhere, you need to text their international number in the UK, which can be quite expensive. ReignDesign is based in Shanghai, China - so how to update Twitter for the price of a local SMS? Via a local Twitter-like service Fanfou.com, and a simple PHP script, it's possible!
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Blog - Technology
Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Weekend hack: Posting to Twitter via SMS in China
Monday, July 6th, 2009ReignDesign Talks at Mobile Monday
Monday, June 29th, 2009
Nick and Matt are speaking at Mobile Monday this Monday (June 29th, 2009) at M1nt. They have two short talks for those in attendance, one on mobile UX and another on the 5 fails of the Apple App Store. We invite you to come by, enjoy the tech talk and a drink with the ReignDesign crew. You can get an invitation here. You can view our slides for the presentation after the jump.
iPhone OS 3.0 reaches two-thirds of iPhones in six days
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
It's been six days since iPhone OS 3.0 software update was released. Todd previously wrote about some of the cool features for users and developers in iPhone OS 3.0.
The question is, should developers start taking advantage of these new features now? How many people have already updated to the iPhone OS 3.0 so far? We analysed metrics data from our applications on the App Store, including Bible Promises, Lovely and Spot the Difference! to analyse the uptake of iPhone OS 3.0 on both iPhones and iPod touches.
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Highlight your site’s hot content with the Google Analytics API
Friday, June 19th, 2009
Want to highlight the most popular articles, blog posts or media on your website? If you use the excellent Google Analytics to track the usage of your sites, you can use the Google Analytics API to create an automatically updated hot-list of popular content.
In this tutorial I'll explain how I managed to create the "hot trends" list on What The Trend?. This shows the most popular "trends" on the site from the last 3 days.
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From bytes to beats, Digital to Analog Conversion using AS3-Arduino
Monday, June 1st, 2009
Probably the simplest DIY way to create your own Digital-to-Analog Converter using the Arduino's Pulse Width Modulation output pins.
5 geeky online services worth paying for
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
We're all accustomed to websites and applications being free online, but sometimes a tool or app is so essential that it's definitely worth a subscription. Here are five online tools and services (with a web development bent) that I use and would not hesitate to recommend:
Google AppEngine vs Amazon EC2
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009
Over the past 6 months, I've seen a number of blog posts evaluating the pros and cons of Amazon's EC2 service versus Google's AppEngine and I wanted to toss my assessment of the two services into the mix. (more...)
Building faster websites by reducing HTTP requests: three techniques
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
One of the best practices to follow for making a speedy website is to reduce the number of HTTP requests needed. Every HTTP request for an HTML file, image, SWF, CSS or Javascript page adds a small penalty to page loading. Moreover, often only two connections can be made to a single server simultaneously, although this limit has been increased on more recent browsers. On graphically rich modern sites using JS and CSS frameworks, the number of requests can multiply rapidly! Here are some techniques we've used to deal with the problem.
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Twitter XSS Vulnerability
Monday, April 13th, 2009
Over the weekend we saw the emergence of two similar XSS exploits on the popular social web application Twitter (with a third showing up early on Monday morning). In the hope of exposing some the tricks of the trade, I'd like to explore the exploit to help raise awareness for how XSS attacks like this can occur. I do not purport to be an expert in this field, merely someone who finds a basic understanding of security "a must" and javascript hacking kinda cool 
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iDroid: an iPhone and an Android G1 in one
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
ReignDesign is proud to present the new iDroid phone straight from our R&D labs in Shanghai. iDroid gives you all the capabilities of Apple's iPhone OS and Android devices in a flexible, portable package.
Flip the iDroid one way and you have a fully functional iPhone and iPod. Listen to music, surf the web, or make phone calls. Flip the iDroid the other way and you've got a fully-functional Android G1. Listen to music, surf the web, or make phone calls. It's your choice.