Year: 2011

App of the Week: Tweetbot

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Back in July, I reviewed TweetDeck, which at the time I felt was the best combined Twitter and Facebook client for iOS. But recently a degree of bitrot has infiltrated TweetDeck such that it now crashes regularly on devices running iOS 5, and so I’ve been on the look out for a replacement. Whilst Seesmic offers one client which supports both Twitter and Facebook (along with ping.fm), it doesn’t integrate them as well as TweetDeck did – the timelines are separate.

Since I have the official Facebook app on my iPhone anyway, I decided to try alternatives, and Tweetbot by Tapbots had been recommended. Unlike other Twitter apps it isn’t free – it costs £1.99 on the UK App Store, and there’s no trial version with adverts. But, having used it for a couple of days, it is worth the investment.

The interface is a little different to other apps, as it uses its own interface widgets, rather than following the same design principles as standard iOS apps. But, it is arranged in a logical way, and it shouldn’t take long to get used to. The main tabs – your timeline, mentions and direct messages – are where you’d expect, and there’s easy access to your favourite tweets, retweets and your profile. It also has very good support for Twitter’s lists feature which other clients tend to skip.

A single tap on a tweet produces a menu below which allows you to reply, retweet or favourite it, or open a further menu to quote, copy, email or translate it. It will also activate any links or @mentions. You can also click the ‘view detail’ button which lets you view the tweet full-screen, and click to see who has replied to, retweeted or favourited the tweet. If a link in a tweet is an image, such as on TwitPic or yFrog, TweetBot will show it full screen, and it supports a large number of services for this.

When composing tweets, you can use either Twitter’s built-in link shortener (t.co) and its own image hosting service (pic.twitter.com), or you can use one of several third-party services. Tweets can be saved as drafts and you can add a location; auto-completion of hashtags and @usernames is also supported.

What makes Tweetbot stand out is its ‘mute’ feature. You can mute users, hashtags or particular clients either indefinitely or for a short period of time. So if you don’t want to see tweets from paper.li, you can mute it across all of the people you follow, but still be able to read their other tweets. Similarly if someone is tweeting more than usual and you’re not interested, you can mute them for a few hours without unfollowing them. And you can also mute hashtags – so if you don’t care about The X-Factor you can restrict the tide of tweets from the people you follow by muting the hashtag.

Finally, unlike some other third-party Twitter clients, it supports push notifications, so that your device will alert you to any new mentions or direct messages. You can also limit push notifications of mentions to people you follow, to reduce spam.

The only real downside is that it only supports Twitter – there’s no integration of other sites like Google+ or Facebook, which is a bit of a shame. However, it does support Twitter very, very well.

I’ve been really impressed by Tweetbot. It’s quite a new client – version 1.0 was only released in April of this year – but it’s being actively improved and enhanced and deserves more attention than it gets. The price tag will put people off, but if you don’t mind spending less than £2 then you won’t be disappointed.

Changing the theme

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A screenshot of the Yoko web site, showing what the Yoko theme looks like on different screen sizes

After a few months, I’ve become bored with the ‘Atom’ theme that I’ve been using since switching to WordPress. So I’m giving the Yoko theme a try, as featured in Smashing Magazine a couple of months ago. I’ve had to customised it a bit, and so I have spent my lunch hour at work learning about WordPress Child Themes so as not to disrupt the core theme files.

To me, it feels more fresh than the previous design. Whereas Atom was a big, extensible framework plugin, this is a relatively simple one. It’s also notable for using the new HTML5 tags and is able to adapt its appearance depending on screen size. Whilst this means that the mobile version of this site, which uses the WPtouch plugin, is now theoretically unnecessary, I’ll keep it for now.

Any thoughts about the new theme are welcome. I think everything should be working correctly but let me know of any funkiness.

Foursquare Thursday – Are its competitors withering?

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A screenshot of items on Gowalla

A couple of weeks ago I focussed on the huge number of new features that Foursquare had rolled out in a four week period. Things have quietened down a bit since then – although there has been an updated Android client to include events and better photo support to match the iPhone, as well as the ability for staff to reverse venue merges, SU2s can edit venue descriptions and a new URL format for venues on the web site. But the service is still very much alive and innovating.

Alas the same cannot be said for its competitors – Gowalla, Facebook Places and Google Latitude.

A couple of weeks ago Gowalla announced the removal of some features from the platform in the next version. Items, like those shown above, will be removed completely; Notes will be removed pending a new implementation to come later, and Pins (like Foursquare’s badges) will see the ‘fat trimmed’ from them. There will be other new features introduced but the announcement doesn’t expand on what these are.

Now while I prefer Foursquare, I do use Gowalla and have cr.osspo.st configured to push my check-ins there as well, and it’s a particular shame to see Items removed. Gowalla stated that fewer than 0.5% of its users actually used items, and there seemed to be a lot of confusion about their purpose. If Gowalla made more effort to explain the role of items, how to get them and why you should drop them at spots then maybe more people would use it – it’s one of the features that makes Gowalla unique.

Foursquare had a similar problem with check-in points before Foursquare 3.0 was released – they didn’t seem to serve much of a purpose and were open to abuse. But rather than remove the feature completely, Foursquare overhauled and improved the points system and re-introduced the leaderboard to encourage competition between friends, and now it works well.

Without Items, the differences between Gowalla and Foursquare are almost minimal. Foursquare’s new Lists feature is very similar to Gowalla’s Trips, and Foursquare’s design improvements mean it’s not far behind Gowalla in terms of appearance. There’s now very little that’s unique about Gowalla and it’s a shame.

I also mentioned that Facebook Places. A recent Business Insider article suggests that Facebook is scaling back its Places feature, and so rather than you checking in you would simply add a location to your status updates and have a choice of venues to do so. Facebook updated its iOS app this week and whilst the standalone checkin feature is there, you can also attach a location to a status update. Facebook also recently discontinued its Deals feature in the UK (not sure about the US) which competed against Foursquare’s Specials, where businesses could offer special deals to those who checked in.

And finally Google Latitude. Earlier in the year an update allowed users to check into anywhere that existed on Google Places, rather than just updating their location co-ordinates, but there hasn’t been any changes since. With the advent of Google+, it may be that Google decides to focus on the location-based elements of that instead, similar to what Facebook is doing.

Bingley Music Live 2011

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Jon Fratelli

Having enjoyed it last year, when we heard that acts such as Feeder and Eliza Doolittle would be playing Bingley Music Live Christine and I snapped up tickets a few months back. The festival was last weekend and, like last year, we had a good time. Though the price of a weekend ticket has gone up by a fiver, there were some bigger acts this year, as well as a smaller, second stage designed around kids and families. Also changed from last year were the toilets; thankfully, the toilet area hadn’t turned into a smelly quagmire by Sunday unlike in 2010. Unchanged were the astronomical drinks prices but I guess that’s par for the course for most festivals.

This was also the first time we went to all three days – last year we skipped the free Friday night events but we made it this year to see the Young Guns. Sadly they’d arrived late and their set was cut to 20 minutes; plus, there appeared to be some technical problems making them sound very flat. A shame because they’re one of my favourite up and coming bands.

I won’t do a full review as my friend Phil has done a much better job at his blog .wav Goodbye – read his reviews of Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Some of the sets from the likes of Feeder, Athlete and Eliza Doolittle were excellent, and worth the ticket price on their own merits – seeing the other acts just added to the value.

As it sold out a few weeks ago (the first time it’s sold out in advance in the five years it’s been running), plans are already afoot for 2012 and tickets went on sale today. I think we’ll wait to see which acts are confirmed first though – whilst the line-up has been good these past few years, I’m not willing to gamble £40. Even if the tickets being sold now are ‘limited edition’ – whatever that implies.

Hopefully next year we’ll be able to make some other festivals – Sonisphere in particular could be good if the right bands are playing. We’ll see.

Neil and Christine’s Geocaching Adventure

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Geocache

This weekend Christine and I went Geocaching for the first time. It’s something I’d considered doing ever since I got my iPhone, almost a year ago (seriously, it does not feel like a year already…), but I never got around to it. Anyhow, a colleague at work had mentioned some of her friends had got into it, and several of my blogger friends like Andy and Firda do it, so I looked for caches near where we live and found 5 within a one mile radius.

With it being a bank holiday yesterday, it meant we both had the afternoon free, so I bought the iPhone app (which I’ll review tomorrow) and we set off. The first one we found is shown above – it’s a ‘micro’ cache which is the second-smallest size of cache, and is about the size of a matchbox. Inside every geocache is a piece of paper to write your name and the date to log your visit. Finding the cache took a little longer than expected, although the hint for the cache was spot on when we finally worked it out. This was also perhaps our punishment for choosing the nearest cache rather than going a little bit further to one recommended for newbies.

We continued on to find three further caches – the next two being the fiendish ‘nano’ caches which are the smallest, and usually magnetic. In fact, when I first found it I thought it was the magnet to hold the cache onto something, not the cache itself – it wasn’t until I twisted it that it opened to reveal the log inside. The last one for the day, alongside the canal, was inside a 35mm film canister, and required a little scrambling down a bank to get to.

So, four caches down. There are obviously many more to find – after all, if there are four in a small town like ours, then the must be thousands in the UK alone, nevermind overseas. Of course, we’ll now have to go a bit further to look for them but it’s possible to do a spot of geocaching whilst doing other activities. There’s two on campus at work to find during a lunch break and I might have a look for some in Huddersfield as I’m there on Thursday. Still, we may go out specifically to find geocaches – after all, we’ll probably be walking between them so it’s good exercise.

I’m under the impression that smartphones are making geocaching more accessible; in the past, if you wanted to find a geocache you would have needed to buy a GPS receiver, which for those not interested in outdoor pursuits isn’t so useful when not geocaching. Smartphones have brought GPS to the masses, and phones with always-on internet bring dynamic maps and access to the Geocaching community whilst on the go, so there’s no need to plan geocaching trips ahead of time. The Geocaching web site could do with some improvements – it’s a bit cluttered and the design feels rather dated.

Tomorrow, I’ll do an App of the Week review of the Geocaching iPhone app. I may blog again about my Geocaching exploits later on, as and when I find more.

Foursquare Thursday – August madness

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It’s been a while since I last posted about Foursquare, and a lot has happened. Foursquare has been busy rolling out new features, so I’m going to summarise what’s new. Most of these have cropped up in the past month.

Lists

You can now make lists of venues, such as your favourite museums, pub crawl routes, best places to go for a good burger, that kind of thing. Foursquare starts you off with three lists – venues you’ve added to your to-do list, tips you’ve ‘done’ and tips you’ve added yourself – but you can add more. It’ll even suggest some based on your checkin habits – it’s suggested food places in Leeds and Bradford for me.

Lists are public and show on your profile. You can also check out lists from Foursquare’s various partner brands like MTV (music video locations) and Time Out (the best burgers in New York).

Check-in to events

Foursquare now pulls data from external sources so that you can not only check into a venue, but check into an event at that venue. In the screenshot on the right is my local cinema, and Foursquare knows which two films are being shown there today. When you select ‘Check In Here’, it’ll ask you which film you want to check into – or whether you just want to check in to venue itself. Events listings appear in the iPhone app and on the web site, but haven’t yet been rolled out to the other mobile clients on Android, Blackberry and so on.

New mobile clients

Speaking of which… the iPhone client got a bit of an update recently. It’s now more blue with several screens re-designed, and it now looks a lot more professional than it did before. Another major change is that photos attached to checkins now show in the timeline on the friends page.

Android also received some attention to make it feel more like a native Android app and not a quickly-ported iPhone app, but it lags behind the iPhone app in terms of features. Similarly the Blackberry app now integrates with Blackberry Messenger and has been finally updated to version 3.0, with the Explore feature.

More brand pages

Foursquare has launched new brand pages, so it’s now much easier to create a brand presence on Foursquare. Pages are free to set up, but I gather there are still costs involved if you want a custom badge for your brand.

More badges

Speaking of badges… as usual, Foursquare has added more badges including a new ‘core’ badge – Baker’s Dozen, for 13 checkins at bakeries. You may want to head to Gregg’s for a sausage roll or 12! New partner badges have been introduced from ESPN, MTV and Pepsi, plus the badge for the upcoming film 30 Minutes or Less is now available globally and not just in the US.

Notifications

Back in July Foursquare introduced a notification ‘tray’ on its Android client and web site, which came to the iPhone a few weeks later (rare example of Foursquare offering something to Android users first!). There’s now an icon to the right of the Foursquare logo, which when clicked will inform you of new friend requests, when you’ve been ousted as a mayor, when a friend does one of your tips or comments on your checkins or when a venue you’ve previously checked into starts offering a special deal. It’s a bit like Facebook notifications. You can also control whether these do a push notification in the mobile apps.

Presidential Foursquaring

Barack Obama is touring the country, so you can now follow The White House on Foursquare. Of course, this probably has nothing to do with him running for re-election next year…

New categories

Foursquare has added a handful of new categories – Tennis stadiums, Military Bases, Car Rental counters for airports, apartments and neighbourhoods. A few existing categories, mainly related to food, now have new icons as well.

US Merge-a-thon

Foursquare used their computers to identify a whole host of potential duplicate venues, which were queued up for SU2s and SU3s to process – over 100,000 of them. As it happens, quite a few were not duplicates but hopefully it will result in a net improvement in the quality of Foursquare’s listings. All of the venues were in the US this time.

So, as you can see, a lot has happened on Foursquare over the past few weeks. Foursquare is still owned and run by its founders and hasn’t been absorbed as a subsidiary of a larger company, so it’s agile enough to be able to make major changes like this very quickly. And hopefully there will be more to come!

The state of MacFUSE & NTFS-3G on OS X Lion

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So I’ve been running Mac OS X Lion (10.7) for a week now, and it’s mostly been fine – most programs run okay and others have had minor updates to improve compatibility. However, there’s some flakiness with MacFUSE and in particular the NTFS-3G package which allows read-write access to hard drives formatted with the NTFS file system.

(If you’re short of time, scroll down to the ‘So what are the options’ section.)

Firstly, a bit of MacFUSE history…

MacFUSE was a project to allow file system packages designed for the Linux FUSE project, which in turn allowed file systems to be loaded in ‘user space’ rather than requiring extensions to the operating system kernel, to be run on Mac OS X. This meant that FUSE did all of the kernel work, thus much simplifying the development of file systems. MacFUSE wasn’t a port of FUSE – it’s a separate project that happens to be compatible with existing FUSE file system packages. It was also developed by a Google employee in his 20% time, i.e. the time that Google allows engineers to set aside for their own projects.

Now, the latest official release of MacFUSE was version 2.0.3,2 which is 32-bit and designed for Leopard, i.e. Mac OS X 10.5. We’re now on Lion, and there hasn’t been a subsequent official release even for Snow Leopard, nevermind Lion. Version 2.0.3,2 ran okay on Snow Leopard provided you used the default 32-bit kernel, but in Lion, the kernel task is 64-bit.

Thankfully, some other developers have picked up the baton – in particular Tuxera, who offer a commercial solution for running NTFS on a Mac. It seems to work fine on Lion, even with a 64-bit kernel. Alternatively, there’s a fork called OSXFUSE, which is in beta at time of writing, although if you want to use OSXFUSE you will need to remove MacFUSE first.

NTFS support

Lion, like other versions of Mac OS X that have come before it, supports read-only access to NTFS disks when a product like MacFUSE isn’t installed. This means that you can read files from an NTFS-formatted disk, but you can’t modify or delete existing files or copy new ones to it. It’s a shame that Apple still hasn’t unveiled official read/write support for NTFS after all these years.

Currently, the only free software I’m aware of for enabling read/write access to NTFS drives is NTFS-3G. The most recent binary release is from October 2010, and whilst this does work on Lion, even with MacFUSE 2.2 you will encounter errors when mounting the disk – namely that it’s taken more than 15 seconds to do so. However, once it is mounted, it seems to work okay, although admittedly I’ve only been working with a seldom-used external drive and not a drive where I expect strong read/write performance.

If you fancy compiling code from source, or have MacPorts, you can get a newer version released in April 2011 which may or may not work better – I haven’t tried it yet.

So what are the options?

There are basically four options you can choose, if you use NTFS drives on your Mac:

  1. Don’t upgrade to Lion just yet. If everything works fine now, you may wish to stay with Snow Leopard until there’s a new binary release of NTFS-3G. Lion is still very new and there aren’t many third-party applications taking advantage of its new features as yet.
  2. Use NTFS-3G and MacFUSE 2.2 as before. In my experience it works, but you do get an error each time your disk is mounted (which could be on every boot up for some) and it is slow at mounting the disk. If you’re reliant on an NTFS drive you may not want to try this just in case things aren’t working properly and you lose data.
  3. Buy Tuxera NTFS for Mac. If you are reliant on an NTFS drive on your Mac, you may want the piece of mind of a commercial, supported product, in which case you can buy Tuxera NTFS for Mac which states that it is Lion-compatible.
  4. Use exFAT instead of NTFS. If you need the drive to be usable on both Windows and Mac, don’t need file system level encryption or compression and are willing to copy all of your data off it, reformat it, and copy the data back, then maybe you’d be better with the exFAT file system. It’s the successor to FAT32, and supports disk and file sizes of over 500 terabytes. It’s also quite well-supported – Mac OS X received support for it in the 10.6.5 update to Snow Leopard, Windows XP supports it with the KB955704 update and Service Pack 2, Windows Vista with Service Pack 1 and Windows 7 supports it out of the box. You will have issues with Linux machines, however, in which case FAT32 is also an option.

I personally have gone for the fourth option for my external drive; the Disk Utility in Lion lets you format drives as exFAT and I don’t need any of the advanced features of NTFS. But another of these options may be best for you.

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.