• Are you comfortable running software that may have a couple of little rough edges?
• Can you provide thorough descriptions of what you were doing when you unearthed aforementioned rough edges? (“UR APP SUX PLZ FIX!!” won’t cut it.)
• Are you cool that the only compensation you’ll receive is getting the latest software before it’s available to the rest of the world?

If that sounds like fun to you, hit up the jump for more information.The beta version of Loquacious should work A-OK on any Android device running Android OS 1.5, 1.6, or 2.0.

I’m aiming for somewhere between 10 and 20 total testers, over several different devices and OSes. I may limit the test if we start pushing past those numbers.

To sign up for the beta test, complete the following form. You will receive an email with more information by Thursday 12/10 within 48 hours.

Right now I’m in the process of getting my business (yes, I am Loquacious Apps, LLC now) right with the State of Georgia and the City of Atlanta, so I won’t be selling or releasing any apps until that is taken care of. Of course, we’re talking about government here, so this is taking forever (okay, not forever, but weeks.)

So, the bad news is that I’m now sitting on a fantastic new version of Loquacious that I’d be perfectly happy to release today.  A lot of stuff has changed, from new features to backend improvements to make things smoother and more usable, to a lot of little look and feel changes that I think make Loquacious even more polished and nice. So, I’m really anxious to get this out there.

The good news is that this waiting is giving me a little extra time to mess around with some new things and get some changes that I wanted to make into this version instead of the next. Last night, I added a gesture-based refresh to the tweet list to save a menu click. That’s a lot of fun. I’m also planning on replacing the 14-day trial demo with an unlimited, ad-supported version. The code for that is mostly done as well.

Anyway, I apologize for making you wait so long. I’ve learned a valuable lesson about scope creep in developing this version. I’ll be watching that much more closely next time.

And I will push out the new version of Loquacious to the market just as soon as my business things are taken care of. I sure hope it is worth the wait for you. Thanks for your patience. And thanks for your support; that’s what makes this all worthwhile.

• Pandora – Okay, so I didn’t actually use Pandora up until this point. I usually just listen to mp3s on my phone at the day job. (Especially since our work internet connection is so slow I couldn’t stream music anyway.) But now that there’s a Pandora app for Android, I’ve been trying it out and it’s pretty freakin’ cool.
• Facebook (official) – So, the official Facebook app is not quite up to par with some of the unofficial apps out there. But it’s a feature-parity disparity, not a quality disparity. I’m sticking with Babbler for now, but the official app is going to give the other apps a run for their money. Which is a good thing no matter which app ends up being the best.
• Foursquare – Foursquare is pretty rad, even though my only Foursquare friend is my girlfriend. We take turns being the mayor of Turner Field. (Go Braves!) But the Foursquare app (official, even though it was fan-developed), makes it much easier and more fun than their (kinda weaksauce) mobile app.

And, on top of that, Motorola announced their first Android phone, the CLIQ, which is a great looking phone. I’ll be interested to see their other offerings in the coming weeks, but this is a fantastic start.

Here’s what happened:

Twitter has started adding the rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tags in the last week or so. The source filter activity populates the list by getting all of the unique sources from the Tweet table and then stripping away the <a> tags before displaying. However, the filter itself is just a straight up compare, <a> tag and all. So a source link <a href=”http://loquaciousapps.com/loquacious”>Loquacious</a> is actually different than <a href=”http://loquaciousapps.com/loquacious” rel=”nofollow”>Loquacious</a> as far as that’s concerned.

Of course, since the oldest entries are purged from the database every day, the problem went away before for I could even devise a decent solution. At least, the problem mostly went away. I still had to re-enable source filters as the old source links were purged from the database.

So, if you’ve been seeing double on the Source Filter tab or have had your source filters magically disabled, that’s the reason why. You can simply re-enable your filters or filter out both copies of the double, and you should be good to go.

I apologize for any inconvenience, and I know that’s not the most beautiful solution, but it seems to be the best one for now. I’ll revisit this issue in a later release.

Thanks for using Loquacious!

• Fixed a bug where Loquacious would not upload any images from the Camera > Share > Loquacious and recent images from the pictures app causing you to receive a “TwitPic returned an error message.”
• Images uploaded to TwitPic from Loquacious now show “from Loquacious” instead of “from api” on the TwitPic website.
• The Edit User dialog box says “Edit User” instead of “New User.”
• Fixed a few minor issues with the regex that highlights links, @usernames, and #channels.

More nerdy details follow.

Issue #1: Long story short… I wrote and thoroughly tested and implementation of TwitPic that shouldn’t have worked before they moved to their new servers. Their old servers weren’t enforcing the Content-length requirement for multi-part form data. Their new servers do. In order to fix this, I was relying on Android’s media content provider to give me the length of the file because there’s no other good way to get that. There’s an issue that I was not aware of with Android returning a length of 0 for new images, which causes TwitPic to return an error since the file length was not 0. Since I wasn’t aware of that issue, I didn’t re-test all of the possible ways you can upload, thus letting this bug slip out. Totally my fault. Loquacious now forces Android to scan the image for file size whenever Android returns a length <= 0.

Issue #2: Funny story, actually. After waiting a couple of weeks and deciding it wasn’t worth it to hold out on releasing, I got the email with my source parameter less than a minute after I published 1.1 to the market.

Issue #3: Yeah, I’m a moron.

Issue #4: Because the regex that highlights links, @usernames, and #channels is by far the biggest load when displaying a list of Tweets, I’ve purposely kept them on the simple side. Since 95% of the links posted on Twitter are either URL shortened or from TwitPic, I can usually get away with this. Of course, after three months of not having a single issue with that, three separate posts had links that borked the morning after I published 1.1, so I’ve taken care of several other possible cases. I’m also enforcing at least 2 characters in a channel name now.

New Features:

• TwitPic integration
• URL shortening (is.gd)
• Vastly improved the multi-user experience with a completely different login/switch user screen
• Search activity
• #channel search added to context menu for Tweets
• Trending topics

Fixes/Improvements:

• Supports change to Twitter API where @replies now include all @mentions
• Upsized the font on Tweet list for even better readability (trust me, you’ll like it in a few days)
• Improvements in scrolling performance
• Fixed rendering of background texture
• All window titles show logged in user name now
• Back button on the TweetList lets you go back to the home screen now
• A number of invisible changes on the back end to make creating new Tweet lists easier
• Fixed a potential bug where it just might, under the exact right circumstances, be possible for Loquacious to think it had cached a user icon that it had not cached. (Only seen it happen when I did stupid stuff in debug versions, but it’s kept me up at night. )

All of the features for the next release are currently working but in need of some serious polish and debugging, so I’m happy to let you know that you can expect:

• Search
• TwitPic integration
• URL shortening
• A much-improved multi-user UI

I’ve also put some work into the laggy scrolling that some people have reported, and I think you’ll be pleased with the improvements there. I appreciate the feedback on that.

My main target for the following release will be background notifications. I’ve been letting ideas marinate for a while about how to make that the best experience possible (and most parsimonious with resources). And since there are actually things to prefer about that, you’ll finally be getting that preferences screen. (Though, frankly, as cool as Android’s preferences framework is, I’d be happy to leave that out as long as I could. Less is more.)

Twitter is in the process of switching authorization from basic HTTP to OAuth. Unfortunately, OAuth can be painful for user’s of a client application. The changes I made to the multi-user UI had this switch in mind, I’ll also be working on ways to make this less painful than a lot of the implementations I’ve seen so far.

So, that’s what’s on the agenda at Loquacious Apps. Thanks for your interest, and let me know what you’d like to see.

Multi-user UI in progress

This is already making my life easier. I don’t have to open the keyboard to switch back and forth between users anymore.

I’ll get back to ironing out the kinks and working on the layout later. But now to spend some time on some more fun features.