Welcome to the Country of OMAN (OldMacAppNet)

Now updated to version 0.4 (20121030)!

Welcome citizens of OMAN! For too long, the Intel infidels (for ease of discussion we will refer to them as Intelfidels) have downtrodden us, the PowerPC faithful! But no more! We will cleanse them with fire! And until we do that, we will use our own tools to access the best new microblogging site, and certainly the most expensive!

Power Mac citizens of OldMacAppNet, claim your birthright! Because Allah knows you PAID for it! ($50/year)

Getting Started

Log into Alpha.app.net.
Start OMAN. An App.net chevron appears in the menubar. Click it and select Authenticate... from the dropdown.
Your browser will automatically pull up an authorization URL. Authorize the application.
On the next screen, this site will tell you what your bearer access token is. From the App.net chevron, select Enter token... and paste it in.
Welcome, fellow Power Mac dweeb.

Purring Muscats

The basic OMAN menu appears at right. Click the App.net chevron in the menu bar and a menu appears with basic options and as many posts as your screen can vertically display from the desired stream or feed (right now defaults to global, since the global App.net feed is awesome).

To keep OMAN fast, the feed is cached and fetched in the background whenever you interact with the menu. The feed is timestamped. To force a refresh, click on Refresh now. You may need to wait a few seconds; if the menu is blank, it's still loading from the server. However, the menu will also auto-refresh according to an internal heuristic whenever you open it up, so in practice it will not be very far behind unless you weren't using OMAN for awhile (in which case the app will sleep).

You will notice that posts are cut off horizontally. This is a "feature." Macs with screens smaller than 1024x768 will probably not do well with this, so try to use a resolution of at least that size. (You can read the full post in a dialogue box; we'll discuss that in a minute.) The amount shown is approximately 60% of your horizontal screen resolution, so a G5 with a 1920x1080 screen will show a lot more than the iMac G4 these screenshots were taken on.

Emirgent Behaviour

If you select Post, you can post! Ha! Isn't that awesome! Just type your post into the dialogue box. There will be a brief pause after you post while the timeline is brought up to date.

If you reauthenticate (because you accidentally deauthorized it or whatever), you should click Change token... and enter the new bearer access token.

If you click Switch to whatever stream, it will toggle back and forth between your personal and the global stream, and your mentions. There will be a brief pause while the timeline is brought up to date.

If you click Quit OMAN you will quit the application, but you should also consider that you will forfeit any benefit in the afterlife that being a loyal follower of OldMacAppNet confers. I'm just saying.

Selecting Sultan Posts

If there is a ~~sultan~~ certain post you want to reply to, display in full or interact with, select it from the menu. By default, you will get a reply box (left). The text field is already prepopulated with the person who posted, and the full post is displayed.

If you just wanted to read the whole post instead of the abbreviated version in the drop-down, just click Cancel.

If you wanted to reply to that user, add your reply and click Reply. There will be a brief pause after you reply while the timeline is brought up to date.

Mahdi Powerful Stuff

If you click More Options, you get ... more options! There are always at least these three:

Repost: appends RP @xxx and posts that. New in 0.3, you can edit this before you send it off.
Conversation: opens the thread up in your browser
@xxx's Profile: opens the profile of the user who posted it in your browser (if there are multiple users mentioned, they now all appear).
If there were URLs in that post, you get a fourth:
Open URLs: Opens all the URLs in that post in your browser

Pick the option and click OK, or Cancel if you changed your mind.

Souqs To Be You

OMAN is a very basic, probably buggy in some serious ways, application. This is an alpha. Feel free to try it out. Don't expect much more than what you see here. In fact, don't even expect that. Some features will have to wait until the App.net API is better defined.

New in 0.4:

Internal systems update only.

New in 0.3:

Reposts are editable.
Updates generate much less unnecessary CPU activity.
Most of the issues with spurious mangled posts in the menu should now be fixed.

New in 0.2:

You can choose between mentions, global and personal feeds.
The number of posts downloaded is now based on your screen size.
In More Options, you can look at anyone's profile mentioned in that post.
Refresh Now actually works like you expect it to.
A locking system reduces the amount of overfetch and time spent waiting for a fetch to complete.

Here are known bugs that will, at some point, be fixed:

Apostrophes appear as backticks in the menu due to a limitation in Tapir, the library used for constructing the chevron menu. I need to fix this bug in Tapir first. It's doable when I get a roundtuit.
Entering more than 256 characters in the text box for posting and replies has "undefined behaviour."

Things that can't be fixed:

Dots appear for UTF-8 characters in the timeline because of limitations with AppleScript, which is used to construct the dialogue boxes. You can post UTF-8, but you can't display it (though the Conversation view can bring it up in the browser as a workaround).

Joke's Over: Download It

OMAN requires a G3 Power Macintosh, but it will be slow; a 1GHz G4 or better is advised. Although it may run with 10.3.9 or 10.6.8, only PowerPC 10.4 or PPC 10.5 are supported. Remember: this is a PowerPC app. It will not run under 10.7 or any later version of Mac OS X.

OMAN.dmg.zip (212K)

Send comments to ckaiser@floodgap.com or @doctorlinguist.

This is a joke and is not associated with the actual country of Oman, which I understand is very beautiful and awesome and awesomely beautiful and did I mention this is a joke and please don't send me any nastygrams? I have always had the deepest respect for the Sultan of Oman. Nothing but respect, homes. Nothing but respect.

Cameron Kaiser