> 2. What can be improved about the desktop workflow?

Get Apple to integrate OAuth into the existing keychain mechanisms on
the Mac and iPhone:

<http://blog.atebits.com/2009/02/fixing-oauth/>

Until that happens, no user or developer is going to be happy with
OAuth in a desktop or mobile application. Sorry to be blunt, but the
user experience sucks when you're using OAuth outside the confines of
a web browser.

Switching between web pages is acceptable, switching between
applications is not. It's really that simple. Until that user
experience problem is addressed, you're going to see resistance with
adoption of OAuth or any other mechanism.

Also, from a debugging/testing point-of-view, HTTP basic
authentication needs to be maintained -- curl is an essential part of
the Twitter tool chain. (If you doubt this, read the new issue
submission form: <http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/entry>.)
It's a variation on the same problem on the desktop: you don't want to
leave the command line to perform the API request.

-ch

Reply via email to