Month: July 2011

App of the Week: TweetDeck

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This week I’m looking at TweetDeck, although specifically I’m focussing on TweetDeck for iPhone. I actually don’t like the desktop version so much – I can see why it’s used by professionals, especially those looking after Twitter and Facebook accounts for brands, but it’s overkill for me. But the iPhone app, whilst more limited in scope, is a very nice little app, and beats out the official Twitter app in my view.

(I say ‘official’ – TweetDeck was acquired by Twitter back in May so it’s arguably also an official app – but there’s a proper Twitter client for the iPhone)

Most Twitter apps work in largely the same way, and as TweetDeck isn’t much of an exception I won’t go into too much detail about the basics – I’ll focus on what sets it apart and why I use it as my main Twitter client whilst on the move. Like most Twitter clients, you get columns for your stream (people you follow), mentions, and private messages, but TweetDeck lets you add others, such as searches or hashtags. I have a fourth column which shows tweets tagged with ‘#4sqsu’, in case another Foursquare superuser has tagged something important, which is quite useful.

TweetDeck includes support for ‘proper’ retweeting of other peoples’ tweets, but also lets you use ‘classic’ retweeting where you stick ‘RT @example’ at the front of the tweet. It also supports deck.ly, a service that lets you tweet more than 140 characters, in a transparent way that doesn’t require browsing to the deck.ly site – although as most other clients don’t support it, if you use it regularly you’ll probably annoy some of your followers.

A big feature, however, is Facebook integration. Status updates (and a few other things) appear alongside tweets in your timeline stream, and you can post status updates to Facebook from within the app itself – in fact, you can post the same thing to Twitter and Facebook. This is great for people who use both services, as you can read both at the same time. There’s also basic read-only Foursquare support, which shows some of your friends’ checkins, although the feature is a bit half-baked and you can’t use it to check-in.

I really like TweetDeck and as such it’s my preferred Twitter client. It’s a free download from the App Store should you wish to use it yourself.

Being a tourist

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Helmsley Castle

I spent the weekend being a tourist, twice in my home town of York. York is a city that, since I no longer live there, I have actually come to appreciate more. Whilst growing up there you took the historic buildings for granted, and the hordes of guided tours just got in your way. But now I see the city in a very different light.

On Friday afternoon, we spent a bit of time at the National Railway Museum – one of my favourite museums as a child, but my last visit was in 2007 (although I blogged about it last year). The main attraction is the return of Mallard, which spent many years in the main hall at the museum but was recently sent to the Shildon Locomotion Museum in County Durham; however, it’s in York on a brief visit and presently takes pride of place on the main turntable. The museum is undergoing a lot of renovation at present, which includes a new entrance hall, so there are fewer attractions than normal – the station hall in particular was rather sparse, which was a shame.

On Saturday, we eschewed York and headed up to the small market town of Helmsley, on the edge of the North York Moors National Park. In particular, we visited Helmsley Castle, parts of which date from the 12th century but has been mostly ruined since the British Civil War in the 1600s. It’s now looked after by English Heritage, and for a little under a fiver each for adults you can spend a couple of hours wandering around. There’s also a museum section, which shows some of the finds that have been excavated as well as information about the castle’s history and how it would have looked over various key periods in its history.

Finally on Sunday we went back into York city centre, partly for some sightseeing but mostly for shopping, for which York is very good. Whilst there aren’t many large branches of chain stores (with the exception of a large Marks & Spencer, split across two sites), there are plenty of smaller shops and thankfully most don’t sell tourist tat. There’s now a sausage shop on The Shambles, and we also called in at Betty’s for some of their fondant cakes which change regularly. We were hoping to go to the Jorvik Viking Centre – again, despite living in York I haven’t visited this in nearly 20 years – but it’s rather expensive unless you make a day of it and go to the other museums (DIG, Barley Hall and Micklegate Bar Museum) – a £16 ticket lets you into all four.

In a way, it’s refreshing to be a tourist in your home town. You can take time to go to the places that you walk past every day, and maybe discover things that you never knew existed. At the same time, you have the advantage of knowing your way around and knowing the best places to eat, or what to avoid. Whilst not every town is set up for tourism, if yours is, give it a try. You can even do it in places like Bradford.

Mac OS X Lion – first impressions

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A screenshot of Preferences in Mac OS X Lion

I made the plunge and installed Mac OS X Lion last night. The install takes a little under an hour all in all, including 2 reboots. During the second phase, i.e. between the two reboots, you can pop open a log file viewer which shows you what it’s actually doing, of which at least 10 minutes is spent running an fsck check on your disk and then creating the recovery partition, which you can use in case your Mac won’t boot properly. (In the past, you would have used the install DVD for Mac OS X, but as Lion is a digital download you won’t have this option anymore).

Anyhow, the install went okay, so here are my first impressions:

  1. Natural Scrolling – I immediately turned off ‘natural’ scrolling, because it felt like anything but natural. I suppose I could have tried to get used to it, but I use a Windows machine at work which has a scrollwheel that works the ‘classic’ way and would rather have consistency. It’s bad enough having to cope with two different keyboard layouts. Natural scrolling is fine on touchscreen devices like the iPhone but I just don’t think it works with a mouse and separate screen.
  2. Scrollbars – I’m very much against Apple’s decision to hide scrollbars by default, and only show them once you already start scrolling – how do you know whether to scroll something if there are no scrollbars? So I’ve told Lion to always show them. On the other hand, I do like the new minimalist look of the scrollbars.
  3. New theme – Lion brings a lighter and more understated look to its windows than Snow Leopard. I like it on the whole, barring the lack of colour in some places and the very light colouring of the new title bars. I’ll probably get used to it though.
  4. Mission Control – liking this so far – really improves on Exposé, and still very quick.
  5. Launchpad – a good feature, but poorly implemented. When you install Lion, it enumerates all of the applications in your /Applications/ folder and subfolders, and then adds them all, putting the apps that came with OS X on the first page. Problem is that it includes all of your applications, including uninstallers, patches for World of Warcraft and other stuff that just doesn’t need to be there, and, as I mentioned, Apple’s own apps are on the first page regardless of whether you’ve used them or not (which in the case of iDVD, iMovie, Garageband etc., is never). What’s worse is most apps cannot be deleted from Launchpad unless you downloaded them from the Mac App Store, and for most long-term Mac users this isn’t the case. I hope an update will allow you to remove any kind of app and have more intelligent sorting, based on actual use, when Lion is installed over an existing installation – I’d consider these to be quite major bugs. As it was, I had to spend quite a bit of time moving things around to suit me, although now that I’ve done that it works well as a way of accessing programs that aren’t important enough for the Dock but still need to be within easy reach.
  6. Mac App Store – I found the App Store application to be a bit slow and unresponsive in Snow Leopard; unfortunately this hasn’t been fixed in Lion. Frequently when I click on one of the 5 tabs at the top, it does nothing but show the spinning beach ball of doom for a few seconds. Some visual feedback registering my click, and a change of the content pane to ‘Loading’ would feel much better. Also, if the App Store is now the preferred way of installing new applications, then Apple need to do more to help developers grandfather their existing users into it – i.e. if you’ve bought a program before the App Store, then you should be allowed to have a special code to switch to the App Store version without paying for it again, for example. This would be especially useful for programs like Adobe PhotoShop Elements for which I have the retail copy and don’t want to spend another £55 on the App Store version.
  7. Full screen apps – not had much chance to use this as only Apple’s own apps support it right now. Where I have used it, it seems to work okay but is a little slow due to the animations – or at least it is on my 2009-era Mac Mini. Faster animations, like with Mission Control, would have been better. Getting out of full-screen is also a little unintuitive as you have to hold your mouse at the top of the screen to show the menu bar – Apple would have been better having the close button in the same place on the window itself.
  8. Apple Mail – since this got some love in this update, I decided to give it a try and see how it stacked up to Thunderbird. I wasn’t really impressed – it’s a bit ugly now that Apple have removed all the colour from it, and the fonts didn’t seem to render very well in the mail listing pane. Although it started up quickly, I found it slow when working with multiple IMAP accounts in comparison to Thunderbird.
  9. New voices – You can now download several extra voices for the text-to-speech feature. I downloaded ‘Serena’, a British English voice that sounds like a Radio 4 newsreader. It’s a big improvement on the existing voices, sounding more natural and less robotic than ‘Alex’ which was the voice added in Leopard, although it’s not quite perfect yet. New voice packs are a 200+ MB download though.
  10. iTunes – just a note that if you installed iTunes 10.4 before installing Lion, you’ll need to do so again as Lion will revert it back to 10.3 for you, and it’ll throw back an error when you try to launch it saying that your library is for a newer version. Again, hopefully a 10.7.1 will correct this.
  11. Software issues – only major software issue I’ve encountered is with NTFS-3G, which allows read/write access to NTFS volumes using MacFUSE. MacFUSE itself needs an obscure beta version to work, but even then NTFS-3G will sometimes pop up an error when mounting an NTFS volume. However, in my limited testing it was still able to write to NTFS volumes. There’s also some niggles with Dropbox – it works okay but some smaller features are missing. A beta update is available.
  12. Bigger desktop icons – something I noticed was that icons that appear on the desktop are larger than before. I think I preferred them smaller.
  13. Performance – I haven’t noticed any real differences in performance, bar some initial sluggishness whilst Spotlight rebuilds its database which may take an hour or two after installation is complete. Previous OS X updates have brought minor speed improvements, the lack of perfomance improvements in Lion is therefore a bit of a shame.
  14. Resume, Autosave and Versions – none of the apps I use support this yet, so I haven’t tried it. However, NeoOffice will support these features in a beta version due out next month.

On the whole? I’m slightly underwhelmed as I can only see myself regularly using a few of the new features. There are also a few niggles that Apple should sort out, as well as some bizarre and unintuitive user interface changes. In Lion, Apple’s direction was to let the computer get out of the way of the user, yet the ‘bugs’ in Launchpad, natural scrolling, no scrollbars by default and my issues with full screen applications actually get in the way of the user, in my opinion. But, it’s early days, and this is a .0 release. Allegedly 10.7.2 is already available to developers so 10.7.1 must be on the way soon and will hopefully alleviate some of these issues. My advice would be to wait a bit.

Getting motivated to go to the gym

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https://www.flickr.com/photos/66551670@N00/388434590/
Photograph of Mr Motivator by Dave Tett, used under a Creative Commons License.

Since moving to Sowerby Bridge in November, we’ve been walking past a brand new gym and swimming pool which opened the weekend we moved in, with the full intention of signing up at some point. Unfortunately, that intention never progressed into an actual registration. Until now.

In about an hour’s time, Christine and I are off there for our induction. We both need to lose weight; when I lived in Bradford, my walk to work was half an hour each way, but with moving that’s been cut to around 15-20 minutes and consequently I’m getting quite a bit less exercise. Likewise, Christine is overweight and though she has dropped a couple of dress sizes in the time we’ve been dating she wants to go further.

At present, we’re not looking to formally join the gym, and instead pay each time; if we only go once a week it’s cheaper that way. Although I may join if I’m in a position to go 2-3 times a week, but primarily we want to go together and exercise as a couple, for moral support.

With a bit of luck, there’ll be new, slimmer Neil and Christine by the end of the year.

Also, Mr Motivator is 58 years old. Crikey.