Developer Break: Twitter, Microsoft, Growl, PostgreSQL

Developer Break – catching the smaller but important stories: Twitter's new API rules, Microsoft's player framework and Office app contest, Growling on Mac and defaulting to PostgreSQL.

• Twitter has caused consternation with some developers by announcing changes to its API. Twitter says the changes, which will come in over the next six months, will encourage analytics and other mining of Twitter content, and it reiterates that it is discouraging third party desktop clients. Instapaper developer Marco Arment summed up the changes saying: "I sure as hell wouldn’t build a business on Twitter, and I don’t think I’ll even build any nontrivial features on it any more. And if I were in the Twitter-client business, I’d start working on another product."

• Microsoft has just released the fifth preview of its Player Framework to Codeplex. The code, released under the Microsoft Public licence, is available for Silverlight, HTML5, Windows Phone, Xbox and, with this new preview, Windows 8 applications.

• Fancy a contest? Microsoft wants developers to create apps for Office and Sharepoint in the catchily titled Apps for Office and SharePoint Developer Contest. There's a grand prize of $10,000 and a chance to have the app featured in the office store, fifteen second prizes of an Xbox and a Kinect, and a hundred third prizes of Microsoft mice...

• Mac OS X developers who use Growl will be pleased to find that an SDK for the as yet unreleased Growl 2.0 is now available to download. The big change in the latest version of the SDK is support for OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion's Notification Center. There's no date for availability of Growl 2.0 though.

• PostgreSQL gets more support from EngineYard, the application hosting company. After rolling out full support for PostgreSQL 9.1 earlier this year, the company has now switched to using it as the default database on the system thanks to features like full-text search, less locking, and good procedural language support.

(djwm)