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.

I have written and talked in the past on the subject of hacking Kinect, and how awesome it would be to hook it up to our robot project at Uni. Well I’m pleased to say that last week we achieved robot arm control with the Kinect sensor, using it to measure arm position and relay it to the arm, which then moved to mirror the action.

Check out the videos below (instructional and cheesy each in their own way) for demos of the Kinect and arm doing its thing.

Credits go to Stefan, Jean-Jacques and Ioannis (my fellow team members), and our supervisor Prof. Harwin for letting us play around with this stuff. If you want the code, it’s all free on Github here and here.

We all know how big and how quickly Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter and the like had to scale. To do so, they had to think outside the box, and make not only wide use, but also many upgrades and contributions to countless open source software projects.

It’s something we sadly something we hear very little about – corporate secrecy keeps much of the juicy details at bay – but these next generation services are not only using these projects, but also making significant contributions to open-source projects and even open sourcing entire chunks of their codebase.

I’d like to sit back for a minute, take a look at what these web powerhouses have been building, and appreciate their contributions to everyone’s development.