Twitter desktop client TweetDeck holds “Hack Days” that are opportunities for their developers to break their normal routines and create a new project. TweetDeck held a Hack Day May 11 and their programmers were hard at work creating some innovative new designs that have the opportunity to make it into production.
Entries included “Quick Send Tweet” that allows you to email tweets to yourself for later browsing, a Gmail notification box and a cool Android hack called “Tweet-As-You-Go” that uses a smartphone camera to view a live background on the compose tweet screen. Check out the entries after the jump and vote for them on TweetDeck’s blog.
TweetDeck was acquired by Twitter for $50 million earlier this month and the concern is that Twitter will either shutdown the service or stop integration of other platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. Yet, if Twitter allows the developers it acquired through TweetDeck to continue to flex their imaginations, there could be some cool integrations coming to both TweetDeck and Twitter.com in the future. Check out the Hack Day entrants below.
Tweet-As-You-Go
Pictured right.
“Don’t stop tweeting, just because you are walking,” wrote Richard Barley, TweetDeck’s community manager in the Hack Day blog post. “You can see where you’re going thanks to the live camera-view background on the compose screen. Thanks to some accelerometer trickery, the camera view fades in as you start to walk and fades out when you stop, so you don’t even need to enable/disable it.”
Unicode Art
A compose-box for ChromeDeck that allows users to add smiley faces, upside-down text and more.
Native ChromeDeck
Built from the Chrome Tweetdeck codebase, it is a native application for Mac, Windows and Linux with Growl notifications.
Deck.ly Expansion for Twitter.com
This one is probably never going to see the light of day, especially now that Twitter owns Tweetdeck. Deck.ly is the feature in TweetDeck that allows users to go over the 140-character limit with a link to a page that shows the full Tweet. Call me a traditionalist, but I think that Twitter would not be quite the same without the strict 140-character rule.
Gmail Notifications
A feature that has often been requested, according to Barley. See Gmail in your inbox column with a link that takes you to the Web.
Quick Send Tweet
I am not sure I would ever use this one, but it made it to the Hack Day highlights. It allows you to email tweets to yourself for offline browsing. The developer in the video says he uses it to see Tweets when he is on the subway.
