Macgasm

iTunes is a terrific app, especially if you have an iPod or iPhone. But what if you have decided to stop using iPods or maybe you have another phone that you want to put your iTunes music on? That is where doubleTwist comes in to play. With doubleTwist you can sync your iTunes library with just about any phone and tons of different mp3 players, you can even sync your PSP with it. Granted, doubleTwist is a separate application, but it is well worth the look at. I use it constantly with my HTC Hero. Another great feature is having the Amazon mp3 store at your fingertips from within the application. But enough of this reading about it, watch the screencast and see for yourself.

The Screencast

Download in HD

If you know me at all, you know that I’m obsessed with three things on my iPhone. First, it’s tower defense games. Second, it’s using any app that lets me shake the phone to do something cool. Third, it’s strategy games, and more specifically block strategy games.

I’ve had a love affair with the Keiffer Bros. ever since I first tried Lexic. They combined two out of three of my favourite things about the iPhone. I could tilt my phone to move blocks around, and I had to spell words with the blocks to make them disappear. It was great fun, and actually got me through part of my summer drive to Columbus (from Canada).

Well, they’ve released another game that’s very quickly eating up my free time, and my not so free time (writing for this site). I hate them for it, but it’s the kind of hate that actually means I love them for it, and also means that this application is one of the better games on my phone right now. It’s actually taken me away from Civ Revolutions, which is no easy feat.

Orba, is a strategy-block game. It’s orbs instead of blocks, but it works like a lot of block games out there. You line up a bunch of orbs that have the same colour, connecting three or more, then you click them to make them disappear. The more you line up, the more points you get. It’s painstakingly easy, but it’s so rewarding to clear a large group of them at once. It’s currently free on the AppStore, but I suspect that it will eventually get a price tag attached to it. I’d recommend heading over there and grabbing it. It’s not every day we get an application of this quality for free on the AppStore.

[Download This Episode]

In this episode, we talk about the best time to use desktops, laptops, or handhelds.

[02.6 MB] [00:08:00] [Hosted by: Josh Schnell & Grant Brunner] [Subscribe]

It seems as though everyone today spends a lot of time looking for the best Twitter client for Mac OS X. There’s tons out there, each with their own unique feature set. Off the top of my head, I can think of Tweetie, Twitterrific, TweetDeck, Bluebird, twhirl, and Beak. So you’ve got all these choices, but which should you use?

Now before you go questioning why you should be taking my word for it, you should know that I have tried and tested each app referenced above (I have no life, I know) and have been able to identify the best and worst. For this article we’re going to put focus on the first two, which I believe to be the best – Tweetie and Twitterrific. So without further ado, let’s get right into this.

First up, Tweetie

If you’ve ever heard the saying “Lead with your best foot forward!” then you’ll understand why we’re starting off with Tweetie. It’s fast, it’s beautiful, and above all it has the most complete feature set that I’ve come across.

A quick glance of the features:

• Unified timeline that includes tweets from those you follow, and @replies sent to you
• Separate tabs for @replies, direct messages, and search
• Multi-account support
• Threaded conversations and direct messages
• View user profiles
• URL shortening with bit.ly, TinyURL, is.gd, and tr.im
• Direct image uploading to TwitPic, yFrog, img.ly, and Posterous
• Built-in Retweet and Reply support
• Mark tweets as favourites

Tweetie is one of those apps that you can lose yourself in for hours. It’s native OS X interface makes it feel right at home on your desktop, and it is incredibly easy to use. It’s very rare that you need to leave the comfort of your keyboard to access the commands and features.

There are a few things that make Tweetie stand out in my eyes. The first being built-in ability to retweet with the click of a button or a simple keyboard shortcut (Command + Option + R). It makes it extremely easy to share stuff with your followers that they usually wouldn’t see, which is one of the best things about Twitter itself. The second would be the separate tabs for replies, and direct messages. Having a unified timeline is nice and all (Which Tweetie does have), but that makes it extremely hard to find your older @replies. Having a tab is a great way to go back and re-read for whichever reason you’d want to. Another one of the biggest features for me is the ability to view threaded conversations (Like Twitter’s ‘in reply to’ links in the Web interface, only it shows all the messages at once).

The dark side *Insert epic Star Wars music*
With pros come the inevitability of cons. After all, nothing in this life is perfect right?

As a web designer and Apple junkie, I love minimalism, and it irks me that Tweetie isn’t very minimal. In fact, it takes up quite a bit of desktop real estate. You can only make the window so small, and even then it still takes up too much space. The inability to hide the dock icon adds to it’s large desktop footprint.

Twitter, Terrific, Twitterrific!

Tweetie is the Twitter app that makes it’s presence known in your desktop environment. Twitterrific is its polar opposite. Twitterrific maintains a minimal interface and performance. It’s a powerful app that takes a backseat until you need to bring it forward to notify your followers of your daily musings.

The feature rundown:

• Simple and minimal user interface
• Multi-account support (I have yet to see this in Twitterrific)
• Unified timeline that includes tweets, @replies, and direct messages
• Unread tweets are shown in dock icon (If set to appear)
• Automatically show the window when new tweets arrive
• Single click access to user profile pages (Launches web interface)
• Collapse tweets in timeline

Twitterrific is perfect if you’re like me and want a minimal desktop footprint. It’s extremely fast and features a clean OS X tooltip / HUD like interface. The ability to hide the dock icon and run Twitterrific from the menu bar is something that I find very valuable. Twitterrific also gives you the ability to auto-collapse all tweets, save for the one selected, in the timeline. I like this feature because it allows you to easily see who has tweeted, and when they did so.

Twitterrific’s product page over at The Iconfactory highlights the keyboard shortcuts as the biggest strength.

The unified timeline helps Twitterrific’s minimal appearance, but makes it very difficult to track your @replies and direct messages. Instead of switching tabs, a la Tweetie, you’re required to scroll your way through the list of tweets all the way to the end, where Twitterrific blindly sticks your older @replies and direct messages. The lack of built-in retweet support is another glaring weakness in Twitterrific’s UI. Mac OS X is all about ease of use, but you wouldn’t guess that while you’re copying and pasting your favourite tweets to retweet them to your followers.

Quick rundown of the rest

TweetDeck (view)
TweetDeck is an app that runs on Adobe AIR, and is perfect for those who want more organization that the average Twitter app offers. TweetDeck is built around the idea of a multi-column filing system, where you can group certain friends together (Twitter lists anyone?) and shun out the rest. The default layout shows a column for the main timeline, your @replies, and direct messages.

The user has the ability to add, remove, and rearrange columns as they see fit. I myself used TweetDeck to seperate those I follow into categories based on their niche (Designer, Coder, Apple, News, etc..). At one point I even removed the main column and replaced it with a group just of Twits that I wanted to keep up with on a daily basis.

Bluebird (view)
Bluebird is a standalone Twitter app that has a beautiful OS X interface. What sets this app apart from others is the theming capabilities. Bluebird supports XHTML and CSS theming to truly make your Twitter desktop experience unique.

twhirl (view)
Twhirl is another application that runs off the Adobe AIR framework. It has a UI very similar to that of Twitterrific, but sets itself apart with the ability to use built in themes. You can choose from a variety of different styles, my favourite being the Crimson style.

Beak (view)
Beak is a standalone Twitter desktop that sports a beautiful native OS X look and feel. It offers many of the features of Tweetie but adds a degree of minimalism. The tabbed interfaces helps you navigate between the timeline, @replies, direct messages, favourites, search, and stats. The tabs however are at the top, as to not make the window wide and clunky.

My favourite feature of Beak is the inline reply capabilities, which allow you to directly reply any tweet you see in your timeline.

So, captain, which will it be?

It’s always hard to pick a definitive answer when deciding between two great things, for example – Safari vs. Firefox, Coke vs. Pepsi, MacBook vs. PC iMac. At this point I’m using Twitterrific, but my indecisive self will likely switch back to Tweetie in a few days, and so on and so forth until Atebits and The Iconfactory join forces to create the perfect Twitter client. We can all dream, can’t we? Who knows, maybe I’ll even bust out Bluebird for a bit.

Today, I will use this post to discuss the merits of having a Private Browsing Mode and Full-Page Zoom in the web browser of my dreams. These are often-overlooked features that can really make the browsing experience much more pleasant.

Private Browsing Mode

Yes, this is probably best known as “Porn Mode,” but it is extremely useful. Whenever you want to avoid leaving a cache, history, or cookies from a web site, you can just turn on Private Browsing Mode. With this feature, there is no need to go through, and wipe out the files later on. Also, this keeps awkward situations from happening. I highly suggest using this if you share your computer with anyone.

Full-Page Zoom

The way zooming used to work in Safari, only the text would be enlarged. Now, when you zoom in or out inside the browser, it dynamically scale all of the content on the page. Vector-based items (Text, SVGs) will remain crisp, but raster-based items (JPEGs, PNGs, GIFs) will degrade in quality when they enlarge. When you have full-page zoom, the layout of the page doesn’t break. It will remain consistent, and that is what I want more than any else: consistency.

You can peep the overview of all of the features in Part I. Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V drilled down on other features that I want out of a web browser.

Photo Credit: Per Ola Wiberg (Powi)

As you may have previously read, Telus is suing Rogers over their advertising campaign in which they tout themselves as Canada’s fastest mobile network and Canada’s most reliable network. As we reported earlier, an iPhone user living in Toronto posted a video on YouTube of speed tests between the Telus / Bell network and the Rogers / Fido network. The results were shocking as the former was pushing 5250 kb/s and the latter only 2611 kb/s.

It would appear as though Telus has the upper hand here, wouldn’t it?

Telus may have the lead on the fastest mobile network lawsuit, but the most reliable network? That’s a whole other story. It appears as though when Bellus launched their spiffy new HSPA+ network, they did not give it a GSM underlying. What this means is that if you turn off 3G (Settings -> General -> Network -> Enable 3G -> OFF), or your connection is lost, your brand new iPhone is basically turned into an iPod touch. No calls and no SMS.

If you’ve got an iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS with Telus or Bell, give it a try yourself.

While Telus may be faster, it’s clear that Rogers is definitely more reliable. What do you think?

RSS feeds were dead for me until I started using Feedly. I got really tired of looking at my feeds in the crappiest user interface known to man. Part of what I like about the internet is all the pretty pictures on my favourite sites. It’s a visual medium, so throwing text at me in a way that took me back to early 1993 annoyed me a lot.

I get it, content is king, and the written word holds more value than the design on a website, but for the love of all things holy, why do RSS readers look so crappy.

Anyway, my favourite RSS reader, Feedly was the only thing holding me to Firefox these days. The fox is a browser I’ll always respect, more for what it’s done, then what it’s doing, but I can’t take the bloat any more. I found myself using Safari and FireFox interchangeably, and it’s not uncommon for them both to be open on my machine at the same time. I’ve finally given up on the ‘Fox. Now that I can get Feedly in Chrome I don’t have a need for Firefox anymore, heck, I might not even have a need for Safari any longer.

A lot of people use Feedly, but I’d be willing to bet that many have no idea how to geet feedly to work in Chrome. It’s really straight forward. Here’s how you do it.

1. Download and install the latest version of chrome.
2. Click this Feedly Extension Link, while using Chrome.
3. Click the Continue Button at the bottom of Chrome (It asks you if you want to install an extension of theme.
4. Finito.

It was not very long ago that I reviewed the TomTom iPhone app. I actually gave it a pretty good review too. Today I received word from TomTom that now the iPhone app is iPod Touch compatible and they will be releasing a second car kit to work with the Touch. This is great news for users that only have an iPod touch and not an iPhone. The price for the app is still $99.99 and no word yet if the car kit for the touch will still be the same price as the iPhone car kit. Look for the new car kit to be available in a few months.