What does a tool maker do when his tool breaks? He builds a new tool to patch the broken one. At least that is what David Beckemeyer (Mr Blog) did when his tweeting garage door opener was threatened by the approaching OAuthpocalypse. This date with destiny for all Twitter programmers is the planned June 30th cutoff of basic authentication. At that point all Twitter apps must communicate with the API through OAuth authentication instead of the much less complicated user name/password form of HTTP Authentication. There are many good reasons for this change, which have been repeated endlessly on the Twitter developer forum, but in practice it is a lot of added complexity, more complexity than David wanted to build into his little, simple garage door device.
