Several clients (‘official’ Twitter app and Plume) successfully capture ACTION_VIEW intents for any twitter.com URL and will display the tweet as desired. Other clients capture various other intents but don’t appear capable of opening a specific tweet via an intent. In some cases there are other undocumented intents that will allow a user profile to be opened via an intent – this is what WristTweets falls back on for clients that can’t directly open a tweet via an intent.

Since others may find this useful, shared below are the intents I discovered for Tweetdeck, Plume, Seesmic, Hootsuite, Twidroid Pro / Ubersocial, and the ‘official’ Twitter app. As far as I know none of these are officially documented, and they obviously may change without notice in future updates.

Twitter client intent filters (how I found them)

To figure out which intents various Twitter clients could accept, I used Package Explorer and the Android Intent Playground.

I hadn’t found the these iSEC Partners tools at the time, but the Manifest Explorer and Package Play apps look like they would also do the job.

When starting an activity with the Intent.ACTION_VIEW intent and a http://twitter.com/{username}/status/{nnnnn} style URL for a tweet as data:

• official Twitter app
• Plume
  appears in app selection popup and opens these tweets as expected.

• Hootsuite
• Twidroid Pro
  appears in app selection popup, but fails to open or opens with an error

• TweetDeck
• Seesmic
  doesn’t even appear in the app selection popup, indicating it doesn’t capture ACTION_VIEW intents containing a twitter.com url.

TweetDeck has intent filters for:

• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like tweetdeck://at/username which opens a user profile.
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like tweetdeck://tag/some_tag which opens a column with #some_tag as the hashtag.
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like tweetdeck://tweetdeck.com which just opens tweetdeck.
• Intent.ACTION_SEND for text/plain and image/* mime types

Twidroid Pro has intent filters for:

• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like twidroid://message/bla
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like twitter://send/bla
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like twitter://com.twidroidpro.twidroidprofile/username
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like http://com.twidroid.list/list
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like twitter://com.twidroidpro.twittersearch/query
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW to catch various URLs for third-party Twitter services (eg Twitlonger, Twitpic etc)
• Intent.ACTION_SEND for text/plain, text/twitter, application/twitter, image/png, image/jpeg and video/* mime types

Hootsuite uses the custom URI scheme x-hoot-full:// and has intent filters for:

• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like x-hoot-full://profile-twitter/username
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like x-hoot-full://search/query
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like x-hoot-full://list/list_name
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like x-hoot-full://web/http://some.url.com
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like x-hoot-full://profile-facebook/some_id
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like twitter://not_sure_what_this_part_is
• Intent.ACTION_SEND for text/plain, application/twitter and image/* mime types
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW to catch twitter.com urls

The Official Twitter app has very few useful intent filters. They are:

• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls like http://twitter.com/ and http://mobile.twitter.com/ . Curiously, I can’t find these in the AndroidManifest.xml data output by PackageExplorer, but they work in testing.
• According to PackageExplorer, the app has Intent.ACTION_VIEW intent filters for urls containing http://mobile.twitter.com/sessions/client/main and http://mobile.twitter.com/sessions/client .. in my testing that app doesn’t seem to intercept these intents.
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for urls at host com.android.contacts with mimetype vnd.android.cursor.item/vnd.twitter.profile .. untested .. might be useful for accessing a Twitter profile associated with the phones contacts.
• Intent.ACTION_VIEW for the scheme twitter-android-app:// which appears to for OAuth based login for that app only. Not useful for much.
• Intent.ACTION_SEND for text/plain and image/* mime types

Enjoy !

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photo credit: yoppy

Entries close January 9th, 2009, so get crackin’ .

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It’s a bit like a “Swedish” tunnel running game crossed with CluClu Land. What’s most interesting to me is how the game was effectively ported between languages and platforms twice before the final product emerged … first written in C#, then ported to the Android Java SDK, before finally jumping on the iPhone bandwagon. I also like the discussion about keeping productive through ‘ritual’ … get up early, drink water, eat healthy, execrise, don’t overwork and take a break if you become unproductive. Good Ludum Dare advice .

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ie automatically generating 3D models of cities. I wish I had time to code something like this. L-systems, agent flocking, lots of cool stuff going on. Maybe one day, if I can find a good excuse.

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1. There didn’t seem to be many games written with Flex at that stage, and very little in the way of how-tos and tutorials. All the tutorials I found from Adobe and others were geared toward ‘business applications’ and the like.
2. The Flex compiler only generates Flash 9, and I wanted to make Flash games for the Wii Opera browser, which only supports Flash 7.

Well, the Wii stil doesn’t support Flash 9 (my guess is it never will), but things are changing on the availability of game-making resources for Flex.

Chuck Arellano over at scripted fun has ported his Herder game for Pygame to Flex, and is having some success.

Meanwhile, Andy ‘pinacolada’ Fischer over at gamedev.net has written an introductory tutorial covering the Flex SDK for coding Flash games.

I suspect that there has been a blossoming of Flex game creation content occurring while I wasn’t watching … it could be worth revisiting.

(Image via Wikipedia)

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