Hasta La Gadget!

Back to the Future turns 25 years old this week. What better way to celebrate this momentous occasion than by watching a recreation unfold on Twitter? Okay, there are probably better ways–like breaking out the old DVD trilogy, for instance. Still, this could potentially be a pretty good way to kill a week in November.

A site called We Are Going Back, which is throwing all manner of Back to the Future-related events from November 5th to the 12th, with proceeds going to fund Parkinson’s research.

The site is searching for volunteers to adopt one of seven roles to be played out on Twitter, including Marty McFly, Doc Brown, George McFly, Biff Tannen, Jennifer Parker, Lorraine Banes, and Mr. Strickland. Handles for all of the characters have been reserved.

During the aforementioned dates, characters will play out their film roles as they occurred in the movie during that week in 1955.

Here’s a quick preview:

@BIFF__ I hate manure! 

5 Minutes Ago From Birdhouse

Surprise of surprises! On the day that Europeans finally got to dig into the Windows Phone 7 cake in earnest, Twitter’s official app for the hot new platform has also gone live. We’ve downloaded it to our own WP7 device and are having a play around with it now. If you need a refresher as to what it looks like, check out the video after the break.

Update: Okay, we can neither log in nor get signed up at present, though others have clearly achieved the feat already. Twitter.com itself keeps alternating between its new and old versions, so we suspect there’s quite a bit of work going on behind the scenes at present. To answer your queries, loading time from the live tile menu to the top tweets page above is approximately three seconds, while scrolling is basically identical to the perfection available on WP7’s own apps. Swiping laterally gets you into Trends, Suggested, and Nearby categories which take a couple of moments to load up their tweets, but otherwise match the performance.

Exiting to the live tile menu throws you out of whatever you were doing and re-entering the app — as is par for the Windows Phone 7 course right now — means starting from scratch. The only way you can save you state is by locking the phone, which takes a second or two to resume when unlocked and returns you to the exact point you were at. Great, now let us in, Twitter!

Hold up, reader David Gordon points out that you can hit the live tile menu via the Windows/Start key and then return to Twitter through the Back button, yay, that works too.

Update 2: There are still errors being thrown up, but we finally got ourselves logged in. Well, it looks just like the vid promised it would and the app itself is working flawlessly, there are no processing delays that we can see. Oh, and there’s a landscape mode. Our only bugbear is that there’s no differentiation between your own tweets and those of your friends. Ah well, check out the gallery below.

Continue reading Official Twitter app for Windows Phone 7 goes live (update: hands-on)

Official Twitter app for Windows Phone 7 goes live (update: hands-on) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 Oct 2010 21:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s the sort of crazy rockstar hyperbole celebrity gossip blogs can usually only dream about. Kanye West, America’s favorite delightfully eccentric rap star, has outdone himself this time. The “Gold Digger” rapper had his entire bottom row of teeth ripped out and replaced with diamonds.

No joke.

West showed up on the Ellen show the other day and showed off his shiny, expensive new smile. “”I just thought the diamonds were cooler.” Damn right, Kayne. Now what to do about those pesky fleshy organs? Prada, perhaps?

West followed up the Ellen appearance with a tweet confirming his new his new chompers. “My teeth are real diamonds… these are not fronts… I replaced my bottom row of teeth with diamonds.”

Check out video from the talk show appearance after the jump.

This is starting to get good. It’s days like these that I really enjoy what I do for a living. What started as a surprise appearance by Steve Jobs on last night’s Apple earning’s call has already turned into a full-on three executive pileup. I mean, you didn’t really expect the companies in Jobs’s sights to just sit idly by as he slammed them in front of the press, did you?

To recap, last night Jobs invited himself onto an Apple earnings call to both brag about the company’s numbers and to stick it to the competition. He attacked the perception of Android’s openness by stating,

We find this a bit disingenuous, and clouding the real difference between our two approaches. The first thing that most of think about when we hear the word “open” is Windows, which is available on a variety of devices. Unlike Windows, however, where most PCs have the same user interface and run the same apps, Android is very fragmented.

Google VP Andy Rubin shot back on Twitter, writing,

the definition of open: “mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make

Rubin was pointing out just how open the software that his company created really was.

It’s common knowledge that the first words uttered by any nerd are “hello world.” That is, unless some CEO starts bad-mouthing your open-source motivations. Google’s Andy Rubin — the father of Android, as it were — just uttered his first words on Twitter with the tweet you see above. From the looks of it, Andy (assuming this is him, the account is not “verified”) is demonstrating how easy it is for anyone to download and compile the latest build of Android. Presumably Jobs will now join Twitter with a response like, “The definition of closed: shut up.”

Andy Rubin responds to Steve Jobs with a coded tweet originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Oct 2010 05:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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