It is with great pleasure that I announce my latest open-source adventure in the form of Twiq.

Twiq is a little applet for Windows that allows you to quickly tweet a message you come up with and then get straight back to work.

Too many times I have forgotten something funny, useful or generally tweetable while I wait for a web browser and Twitter.com or a client to load. No longer! Twiq is always listening just a keypress away (Ctrl+Win+Space in fact) to get that tweet dispatched efficiently.

You can’t read tweets with Twiq, but then you’d get distracted from whatever you’re working on. The flow for creating a tweet with Twiq has been designed to be super-smooth. Ctrl+Win+Space brings up the program, and puts your cursor in the tweet box; 140 taps gets you a witty, thoughtful, or useful tweet; press Return and your tweet is dispatched; Ctrl+Win+Space gets rid of Twiq and you back to work.

By popular demand – a screenshot of Twiq in action:

Twiq is free and open-source. The code is on Github, and you can get the latest installer from there too.

On Sunday night, the SD card in my phone became corrupt when I plugged it in to my PC (I don’t know why) – but that’s a story for another day. It was when I was fixing it that I realised about how Windows, in the past 5 or 6 years, has moved gradually into a truly consumer-space operating system.

What do I mean by this?

Well think back to the days of Windows XP. It really was the do-it-all operating system – developers could get right down into the system internals and hack around as they pleased with their apps, and you could get a lot of applications which bypassed OS components to perform functionality for you; in this case, formatting bad memory cards.

Now’s a great time to get started with Windows Phone 7. The launch of the first hardware is coming up in just weeks now, and all of the developer tools are out and in the final versions ready for launch.

Everyone’s talking about Microsoft’s new phone platform, Windows Phone 7, which is making its debut this holiday season.

But what is Windows Phone 7? What will it be like to use? How will it look? Find out about Hubs, the Design Philosophy, and more about the platform in the 7-minute video below.

The latest version of Microsoft’s IDE for development on Windows and other Microsoft platforms has recently been released, which is Visual Studio 2010.

You may have seen my post some time ago about the long list of new features and improvements that have made it into the latest version.

At the recent UK Tech Days event, Microsoft’s GM for Visual Studio gave a presentation on building great Windows 7 apps with Visual Studio. He made lots of good points, and mentioned lots of cool features. Well worth checking out the video, which I have embedded below.

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