I just noticed that Google quietly tweaked the look of the buttons on Gmail. The new look resembles Cocoa’s segmented controls, and is definitely a welcome change on my part.
Four Twitter Clients for the iPhone
February 3, 2009
Twitter and the iPhone are a match made in heaven. My Twitter client is one of the three most used applications on my iPhone (the other two being Phone and Mail), and I actually think I use it more than Phone.
Today, I review four Twitter clients for the iPhone: Tweetie, Twinkle, TwitterFon and Twitterrific.
Grading Criteria
I reviewed and graded each client (except Twinkle, but more on that later) according to two sets of criteria. The first set is the set of features commonly found in Twitter clients, such as deleting tweets or following new people.
The other set is my own, personal gripes with most Twitter clients, and all iPhone apps in general. This set includes criteria like being able to determine my location correctly, using the correct date/time format according to my locale, and scrolling speed.
Tweetie
Tweetie is a relatively new contender in the iPhone Twitter client arena, but it has an almost fanatic following (including John Gruber), making it the second most popular paid social networking app in the App Store (as of this writing).
I had some major gripes with Tweetie 1.1, and most seem to have been resolved with 1.2, but two important issues remain:
Tweetie cannot determine my location correctly
Well, actually it can, but for some reason it doesn’t translate my location to a city name, and just sets my location to “iPhone: <latitude>, <longitude>.” As it turns out, and much to my surprise, the only Twitter client capable of determining my location correctly is Twitterrific.
Tweetie doesn’t use the correct date/time format. (See update)
Tweetie is the only Twitter client I’ve tried that doesn’t use relative times. Instead, it displays absolute times, and unfortunately, it fails to display these in the correct format. The previous version displayed all date/time information using the US locale, and 1.2 is even worse: the day names are in Turkish, but it still uses the US format (e.g. Pzt 7/28 4:20 PM).
I can’t say this is a showstopper, but proper localization is key to a successful Mac application, and iPhone applications are Mac applications. Attention to small details is what makes us Mac users, and I got a news flash for Tweetie developers (and all other developers who don’t care about proper localization): there’s life outside the US, and we don’t use a 12-hour clock or write the month before the day. You should have fixed these before the 1.0 release, but you’re already at 1.2 and localization still sucks.
Grade: 8/10
Twinkle
Twinkle is one of the first Twitter clients on the iPhone. It was available before the App Store (and the SDK), so I used it for quite some time, and I was very happy with it.
After the SDK and the App Store revolution, I installed Twitterific and didn’t try the new Twinkle until this review. Well, actually I still haven’t tried it.
The new (post-SDK) Twinkle requires you to sign up for a Tapulous account. This is apparently because Tapulous is trying to build a FriendFeed-like network, and therefore Twinkle is somehow “part of a bigger plan.” Twinkle developer Tristian O’Tierney explains:
What many people want is just a Twitter client, and I’m sorry to say as a basic design decision, that’s just not what Twinkle is or is meant to be.
Well, I’m one of those many people, and as much as I like Tap Tap Revenge, I’m not signing up for yet another account just be able to post and read 140-character messages. No thanks.
I really wanted to know how Twinkle held up against the competition (and I still do), but apparently Twinkle is not just a Twitter client anymore, and is therefore disqualified.
Grade: 0/10
TwitterFon
I tried TwitterFon after a recommendation by a friend, and I honestly didn’t think I’d like it this much. It has all the features (with the exception of multiple accounts) one could wish for in a Twitter client, and it’s free.
I can say that Tweetie has a slightly better-looking UI, but TwitterFon uses relative times, and therefore doesn’t suffer from improper localization. For all I can say, TwitterFon is at least as good a Twitter client as Tweetie.
Grade: 8/10
Twitterrific
Twitterrific is the Twitter client for the Mac, and I’ve used it intermittently since its debut.
I downloaded the iPhone version the day it was released, and I was surprised to see how different (in a bad way) it is from the desktop version.
All lacking features aside, Twitterrific for the iPhone has the worst user experience among the four clients I’ve reviewed, and scrolling is excruciatingly slow. This may be partly due to the ads, and there’s an ad-free premium version for $9.99, but that’s the only difference between the two versions, and I think $9.99 is a ridiculous price to pay for a Twitter client, especially one that lacks critical features and has a mediocre user experience.
Special question to the Twitterrific team: how high were you when you decided to use “double tapping?” Thanks.
Grade: 4/10
Feature Matrix
| Tweetie | TwitterFon | Twitterrific | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Multiple Accounts | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Delete | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Follow | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Search | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Favorites | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| @Replies | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Direct Messages | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Re-tweeting | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Correct Location | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Ad-free | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Intuitive UI | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Scrolling | Fast | Fast | Slow |
| Price | $2.99 | Free | Free |
Conclusion
There’s a tie between Tweetie and TwitterFon. They’re both good Twitter clients, but there’s always room for improvement: TwitterFon could use a bit more polish, and Tweetie developers have to fix the localization problems.
If you’re American or you just don’t care about the small details (ie. you use Windows), please go ahead and buy Tweetie. You’ll be supporting an indie developer ($2.99 is not much, in all probability you paid more for your lunch today).
On the other hand, if you just want a good, free Twitter client, and don’t have multiple Twitter accounts, use TwitterFon.
As for me, I’m currently using Tweetie, and I hope the localization problems will be gone with the next release. If they aren’t, then I’m switching to TwitterFon for good.
UPDATE (Feb. 4): I got an email from Loren Brichter, the guy behind Tweetie, the day I published this post, and he wanted to know more about the localization issues. We discussed (well, most of it was me ranting) the issues at length, and he said he will try and fix them in 1.3.
I would like to thank Loren again for the quick response and consideration.
Palm Announces Pre
January 9, 2009
Yesterday, Palm announced its new smartphone, the Pre, at CES.
Now, if I thought Pre was just another iPhone wannabe (like the Samsung Omnia or the BlackBerry Storm), I would have just bashed it on Twitter, but it’s not.
Palm, which was a sinking ship until yesterday, seems to have created the first real iPhone competitor, and even if the device turns out to be not-so-great, I think there’s a lot to be learned from webOS’s (Pre’s new operating system) user interface concepts, even for Apple.
OSNews‘ Thom Holwerda seems to agree with me on this one:
To me, it seems as if Palm is the first smartphone manufacturer to develop an interface from the ground up specifically for a mobile device, without windows, applications, or other desktop-centric ideas. Oh, and it does copy/paste. While it’s dangerous to make any such statements, I do believe that Palm has out-Appled Apple on this one: the iPhone already feels hopelessly kludgey and outdated.
See the Pre in action for yourself in Ars Technica‘s hands-on video:
Ars Technica first hands-on with the Palm pré phone from Ars Technica on Vimeo.
Now, the question of the evening: would I buy a Pre? Unlikely. I’m a sucker for everything Apple makes.
Do I promise not to bash it if it turns out to be a piece of crap? Absolutely no. But I think Palm brings new breath to the smartphone market with the Pre (instead of blindly copying Apple like everyone in the industry has done for the past 33 years), and that’s enough for me to like it.
Restart Will Be Required
December 23, 2008
I just installed a Raw Camera Update that required a restart.
I remember a time when only kernel and QuickTime updates required a restart, but now it seems like requiring a restart is the new black.
TheAppleBlog covered this last year, but things seem to be getting worse with each day. Is Apple outsourcing software updates to Microsoft? Or maybe the arrows in the Software Update icon are meant to represent a restart?
Macros Have Been Disabled
December 15, 2008
Last night, my girlfriend (who unfortunately still uses Windows) was trying to print her homeworks using Word 2007 when she was presented with this message:
Can you see the problem with this message?
Regular users don’t know what a macro is, and they don’t have to. What’s more, there shouldn’t even be a macro in my girlfriend’s homework files. Who put that macro in there, and again, WHAT IS A MACRO?
Please don’t present your users with messages which mean absolutely nothing to them. This leads to confusion, and nothing else.
If you absolutely have to show a message like this, at least place a “More Info” link next to it, so the user can read and understand what the message means.
Say Goodbye to nspluginwrapper
November 19, 2008
As reported by OSNews, Adobe just released an Alpha version of 64-bit Flash plugin for Linux.
It still doesn’t support transparent backgrounds, but at least it doesn’t crash every five minutes like nspluginwrapper.
Here’s how to install it on Ubuntu:
Download the new flash plugin from here. Then, in a terminal type these:
tar -xzf libflashplayer-10.0.d20.7.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz
sudo apt-get purge flashplugin-nonfree nspluginwrapper
mv libflashplayer.so ~/.mozilla/plugins
Why Tire Companies Shouldn’t Make Routers
November 8, 2008
Recently, my neighborhood was blessed with fiber-optic broadband by Turkey’s brand-new ISP Tellcom.
Providing download speeds up to 100 Mbps (which is what I signed up for), Tellcom’s QuikNet is a huge improvement over TTNet‘s lousy ADSL service, which is what most people in Turkey currently use.
Obviously, I was one of the earliest switchers, and after being a customer of probably one of the worst ISPs in the world for years simply because I had no other choice, I was almost glad to pay the $150 termination fee, and now I finally have a real broadband connection.
But there’s one drawback.
The QuikNet subscription package includes a Pirelli DRG A226G broadband router. Yes, it’s the same company who produces the Pirelli tires and publishes the famous Pirelli Calendar. Before opening the subscription pack, I had no idea Pirelli produced anything other than car tires, but apparently they have a whole business in broadband routers and cabling. They even make mobile phones!
It didn’t take me long to decide that the DRG A226 is the worst router I’ve ever used. Period.
The DNS server crashed constantly, requiring me to restart the router. The Wi-Fi connection almost never worked on the first try, and DHCP was, well, unpredictable at best. Oh, and the UPnP forwarded ports were never closed, not even after a restart.
I naively thought that maybe my router came with an old firmware, and a new version was available that fixed all this. The Pirelli Broadband website has absolutely no information about firmware updates. In fact, all the information available on the website about the router is limited to the 98x161px JPEG image you see above, and a PDF User’s Manual.
Then I found a “Firmware Upgrade” section in the router’s web interface, but it wasn’t very helpful, as you can see:
But on closer inspection, the interface revealed an URL which didn’t come up on any of my previous Google searches: update.pirelli-discus.com. It looked like an automatic update server, but apparently it wasn’t working.
I thought “hmm, maybe I can find firmware upgrades if I go to www.pirelli-discus.com.”
I was wrong. The domain had expired, and Pirelli didn’t even bother to renew it. I was not only frustrated, but also shocked. How can you forget to renew a domain which is responsible for distributing firmware upgrades to thousands of routers worldwide? Can you imagine Microsoft forgetting to renew the Windows Update domains? Or Kaspersky forgetting to renew the Kaspersky Anti-Virus Database update domains? The results could be disastrous.
These domains are responsible for distributing software updates, which are usually automatically installed onto users’ computers and executed, and unless the updates are digitally signed, anybody who acquires control of these domains can distribute executable code onto millions of computers without breaking a sweat.
Now I know Apple uses digital signatures for its software updates, and I can only hope that companies like Microsoft, Kaspersky and Symantec do the same. As for Pirelli, I highly doubt that they employ any form of cryptographic security.
I now own the pirelli-discus.com domain, and I wonder if I can distribute firmware upgrades using this domain. I never mean to use the actual paths of course, so Pirelli users need not worry, at least for now. But if it works, and if someday I do what Pirelli did and forget to renew this domain, then anybody can purchase it, and Pirelli users will be in trouble.
My New Baby
November 6, 2008
Is a PowerBook Duo 2300c:
It has a German keyboard, and German System 7.5.2 installed but hey, it’s still working after 13 years, and it was well worth the $30. =)
Now if I can only find a way to install an English version of System 7 or Mac OS 8 onto this baby (which doesn’t have a floppy, optical drive or ethernet), then I can even use it for distraction-free writing.
See the Flickr set for more photos, and size comparison with my 12" PowerBook G4.
My Brand-timeline Portrait
October 4, 2008
I recently stumbled upon a post by Jane Sample, that later become known as her Brand-timeline Portrait.
It’s been almost 4 months since she made that post, but what the heck, here’s my brand-timeline portrait for a typical workday:
Compiling ns-2.1b9a on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron
September 7, 2008
Compiling ns-2.1b9a
- Install these packages: build-essential gcc-3.3 libpcap-dev libx11-dev libxmu-headers libxt-dev
- Download ns-allinone-2.1b9a-gcc32.tar.gz.
- Download my patches.
- Apply patches 1, 2 and 3.
- Run ./install
Adding TENS 1.2 (Optional)
TENS adds many features (like multiple interfaces and directional antenna support) to ns-2. It’s the reason I needed ns-2.1b9a in the first place.
I’ve created a patch that includes all the changes TENS introduces to ns-2, so you don’t need to download TENS.
In the ns-2.1b9a directory:
- Apply patches 4 and 5.
- Run make clean
- Run make depend
- Run make
Adding Agent/PBC (Optional)
I needed Agent/PBC for periodic broadcast messages, but Agent/PBC was introduced in ns-2.33. So I copied it from ns-2.33 and made some minor changes to ns-2.1b9a to make Agent/PBC work.
In the ns-2.1b9a directory:
- Apply patches 6 and 7.
- Run make