What can you expect to earn in the Valley??

Silicon Valley, the Mecca of technology companies, dream (often unattainable to many outside EUA) to any developer worth himself. Well, the infographic shows interesting facts about what's happening in this valley near San Francisco.

To begin to bring the piece highlighted on the title, the salaries of the superstars of the engineering of software in large enterprises: from Google's $180,000US to the modest Twitter's 125,000US pays... Whom was a brainiac!!

Mittratter - Source Code

Ok, the Compilated App has been released here: Mittratter and its post related: http://mittrasw.blogspot.com/2010/09/mittratter-twitter-client-for-osx.html. What would help to other programmers trying to implement oAuth into their developments will be the source code used by Mittratter to sign into Twitter's Servers. Also I will give a brief explanation of how does this thing work.

As I explained here and here, now Twitter uses the oAuth Procedure, well the code behind is quite tricky and might confuse at first sight. Mittratter is an application developed in Objective-C, so the code is going to display here helps to implement those functions into iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad developments as well. Don't forget to do a quick review of the Twitter API where few libraries and implementations could be found. Well, let's get started.

Mittratter - Twitter Client for OSX

Yesterday, I was writing about the Twitter oAuth Authentication Method, well today I will release Mittratter, it is a simple Twitter Client developed with Objective-C and XCode. It took me few hours of development to understand the way oAuth works, Twitter and available documentation about it.

With the App running, I will give an example how exactly this works:

Twitter oAuth Procedure

After one week figuring out how to interact with the Twitter oAuth implementation, I could came up with a simple client that connects to their servers, obtains valid credentials and post as if you were at the web page.

Well, it took me quite a long time to understand how this oAuth authentication procedure works, so I will explain what I learned about:

Since August 31 , 2010, Twitter's servers doesn't allow anymore the "Basic Authentication Mode", in other words, any client or simply cURL statements were capable of send information and then update the status, get timeline or send private messages. Clients apps were those responsables for the user/password handling and their respective responsibility: if an app could be hacked or the credentials management weren't good enough, that information could be broadcasted to third parties and arrive to undesirable hands.

Twitter API Has Changed

Since the August 31, 2010 one of the most famous micro blogging social networks or Twitter for everyone, changed their API (aka Application Programming Interface), so all those applications that used to communicate to Twitter's servers via Basic Authentication, they will become useless (like "Status Widget in Moto Blur from Dext).

I realize of this event because I was programming a small client for OSX, so when I tried the old curl -u user:pass twitter.com/account/verify_credentials.xml to check the authenticity of the user/pass provided twitter told me: "Basic authentication is not supported". The documentation of this change says:

Transitioning from Basic Authentication to OAuth isn't simple for everyone. You're going from an approach where you send a login and password with every REST API request you make to one in which you're first having to acquire user authorization, and then sending credentials that both identify your application and the user in every request.

Well, if we want to keep using their services we must complain with their new rules. In further post I will  explain how to use the new method using Objective C