It has now been well over a year since the official Twitter app for OS X was last updated. It launched with the Mac App Store in January 2011, and the most recent version, for Snow Leopard, was released in June 2011. Since then both Lion and now Mountain Lion have come along, and yet Twitter haven’t made any changes.
Early signs of ‘bit rot’ are setting in:
There’s no support for posting images using Twitter’s own image service (pic.twitter.com) – you have to use a third-party service
Of those third-party services, pix.im is listed but it no longer works
Promoted tweets and trending topics do not show in the timelines, as they do on the web and in the official mobile clients
It’s a shame to see the official client abandoned in this way. I used it as my main Mac desktop client for quite some time, before switching to Osfoora and then Tweetbot for Mac. And before January 2011 I used Tweetie, which was bought by Twitter and became Twitter for Mac. It’s especially concerning when Twitter has been discouraging third parties from developing ‘traditional’ timeline clients, because at present it’s the third-party clients that offer up-to-date features.
So my new iPhone 5 has finally come. It’s not quite the model I was intending – I had ordered a black 16 GB model, but an order mix-up with 3 meant that I didn’t receive it as planned on Friday and after talking with a very nice person at customer services I ended up with a white 64 GB model, at no extra cost. I’d have preferred a black one, but I can’t argue with getting four times the space for the same price. I’ve saved in the region of £150 as a result.
Because I backed up my iPhone 4 to iCloud, when it came to setting up my iPhone 5 I just needed to connect to wi-fi, give it my iCloud login and tell it to restore from the cloud backup. This meant that all of my settings and apps would be automatically installed, just as they were on the old handset, which saved a huge amount of time getting the phone set up. It wasn’t totally smooth – stored passwords didn’t seem to copy, for example, and some apps like Pocket needed re-installing – but much better than starting from scratch. In particular, my progress on games such as Angry Birds was carried over, to my relief. Many of the apps I use regularly, like the aforementioned Tweetbot and Pocket, have been updated for the new larger display, but older apps do work okay. Apple did a good job of implementing the letterbox mode for these.
Physically the new phone is much nicer to hold – it’s noticeably lighter and thinner, and the edges don’t feel as sharp as they do on the iPhone 4. You can still use it easily with one hand too, unlike the wider screens on some Android phones which require you to change hands to reach far off corners of the display. The new Lightning connector is nice, although I’m a little less happy at the prospect of forking out £15 for an extra cable; plus, with 2 iPods and an iPhone 4 in our household we’ve no shortage of the old cables. I’ll also need to look into buying a case for the iPhone 5, as Apple haven’t released any bumpers for this model like they did for the 4 and 4S, nor do they sell any third party cases in Apple Stores, as Dave found out.
The new phone is much more responsive than my old one – apps work faster, especially Foursquare and Tweetbot. Support for HSPA+ also makes web pages download more quickly, and provides a small speed jump ahead of 3 rolling out 4G LTE services next year.
I’ve also had a play with Siri – I’m quite impressed that it understands almost everything I say (I have a northern accent) although it can’t always find data. I asked it about a local rugby league team, Bradford Bulls, and it interpreted it as the Chicago Bulls. For information about local places it uses Yelp, which is rather rubbish in the UK – searching for a nearby Nando’s found one in Leeds but not the two in Bradford which were much closer to me at the time.
All in all, I’m really impressed. Whilst it’s definitely an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary device, it’s a clear improvement over the iPhone 4.
This weekend, like every first weekend in September, is the annual Rushbearing festival in my adopted home town of Sowerby Bridge. It’s a modern revival of a tradition which originally saw freshly harvested rushes being delivered to churches in the area to cover the floors. Although it died out in the 19th century, it was revived in 1977 to celebrate the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. 35 years later, in the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee year, it is still going.
The modern event takes place over two days – the Saturday and Sunday of the first weekend in September. It involves local men pulling a one (imperial) ton cart around the town to deliver a token rush to each of the town’s churches. The cart also calls at most of the town’s pubs, of which there are a lot – 14 just in the town centre itself. Essentially, this makes the rushbearing a large and very glorified pub crawl, and indeed many of the participants carry a tankard. In fact, there are even several tankards attached to the cart itself.
The same cart is used every year, and this one was built in 1984. A ‘cart maiden’, usually an 18-year-old girl, sits atop the cart and waves at people. Behind the cart is usually a marching brass band and several traditional British dancing groups – usually Morris Dancers, but in various different forms.
Last year we missed the Rushbearing as it was the same weekend as Bingley Music Live. But with the somewhat lacklustre line-up, increased ticket prices, and the need to save money for our forthcoming nuptials, we decided not to go this year. This gave us chance to experience a rather different festival closer to home. Although I’m sure the nice weather helped, it was well-attended with many people turning out to line the streets, and patronise the various drinking establishments that the cart called at en route.
Modern-day rushbearing isn’t unique to Sowerby Bridge and it does take place at other northern towns and villages, although these are all in Greater Manchester, Lancashire or Cumbria; Sowerby Bridge is the only Yorkshire town to retain this custom. For a town that is home to yuppie commuters like ourselves, it’s nice to see it keeping in touch with some traditions.
Good password practice should mean that passwords are hashed, using a one-way algorithm, and ideally salted as well. Tesco claims its passwords are stored in an encrypted format, but presumably this is a symmetrical encryption method because if you forget your password, Tesco will email it to you, in plain text. Remember, email isn’t encrypted so anyone who is snooping your emails will be able to retrieve your password, and log in to your Tesco account.
What makes this worse is that Tesco doesn’t allow for particularly strong passwords, either. They have to be a maximum of 10 characters, and can only contain letters or numbers. Even worse is that passwords aren’t case sensitive, and top it off, the tesco.com web site uses very old versions of Microsoft’s IIS and ASP.Net, which are potentially more vulnerable to security attacks.
If you have a Tesco account, I’d therefore strongly suggest that you ensure the password you use is unique (this is good advice for any web site but especially applies here) and that you don’t store your credit card details with Tesco. If you don’t use Tesco anymore, then you could contact them to ask them to delete your account, citing fears about their security.
Of course, Tesco are far from being the only offenders here, and Plain Text Offenders collects various emails from web sites who will also send you your password in plain text.
If you fancy an evening of entertainment, for free, then one great way of doing this is by being in the audience for a TV recording. Many TV shows are recorded in front of a live audience and in the vast majority of cases the tickets for the audience members were given away free. Christine and I have been to a couple of recordings ourselves, and I have some knowledge to impart on the subject.
1. Find out where to get tickets
There are a number of different companies and organisations that offer tickets. Sometimes this is the broadcaster or the production company itself, but more often that not a third-party company will provide the audience and there are a number of such companies that operate in the UK.
They will list the shows that they are currently offering tickets for; you may also find that you can join a waiting list for tickets for their more popular shows, even if they are not due to be recorded for some time (remember that some shows are recorded as much as 6 months in advance of transmission).
The main ones to look at are:
BBC Shows – for TV and radio programmes made by the BBC themselves
Applause Store – for big shows like X-Factor, Big Brother, but also shows like QI as well.
TV Recordings – some smaller shows like Russell Howard’s Good News and Not Going Out
SRO Audiences – generally used for Channel 4 shows like 8 Out Of 10 Cats and 10 O’Clock Live
Lost in TV – game shows like Superstar, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire
Many of these let you sign up to an email list, so that you are notified when tickets become available for new shows.
2. Most shows are recorded in London
London has more TV studios than the rest of the UK so the majority of recordings take place there. This is great if you live near London but a bit of a pain for us Northerners. You will find some in Birmingham, Manchester and Salford from time to time though.
3. The tickets are not for resale (so don’t buy or sell them)
Because the tickets are free, some people try and sell them on sites like eBay for a quick buck. Don’t do this – if the company offering the tickets finds out, you’ll find the tickets cancelled and you may be barred from future recordings. And, if you buy tickets this way, don’t be surprised to find yourself turned away if the tickets were cancelled, leaving you out of pocket.
4. You need to get there early
By early, I mean at least an hour or more before the doors open. This may seem extreme but empty seats in an audience looks bad, so the audience companies offer more tickets than there are seats, to compensate for no-shows. Unfortunately, should everybody turn up, if you’re at the back of the queue you may be turned away if all of the seats are already full.
For this reason, I’d advise against making special trips to places just to be in the audience. It’s happened to me before.
On the plus side, if you do turn up but the recording is already full, generally you will be put on a ‘priority list’ for a future recording.
If you do get in, then be prepared to wait around for some time before the recording starts – so bring something to read if you’re easily bored.
5. If you can’t go, let the audience company know
When you book tickets in advance, there’s always a chance that, nearer the time, something crops up which means you can’t make it. In this case, contact the company that issued the tickets, tell them that you can’t make it and ask them to re-allocate the tickets. Whilst I mentioned earlier that these companies do compensate for no-shows, by surrendering your unused ticket, you may give somebody else on a waiting list a chance to go instead. Plus, it keeps you in good standing with the audience company – if you don’t show up, then they may decide that you’re an unreliable guest and you will be less likely to get tickets in future – especially for the more popular shows.
6. If you attend regular shows, you may get priority tickets
If you build up a good reputation with a particular company, by showing up on time regularly (and surrendering unused tickets), you may be issued with ‘priority tickets’. This means you’ll be let into the studio first and will probably get the best seats, and often allows you to jump the queue. However, it’s still not a guaranteed seat, and generally you will have to turn up even earlier.
7. Don’t expect to be treated like a paying customer
When you pay to attend an event, you will have some expectations, such as comfortable seats and being treated nicely by staff. The opposite applies here – by attending on a free ticket, you are doing the programme makers a favour. You may find that you’re sat on an uncomfortable wooden set, and you will be expected to follow the instructions given to you by staff at the event. In particular, this includes turning off your mobile phone during the recording (in case there’s interference with radio microphones), keeping quiet when you’re told and also laughing or applauding when required. Hopefully the show will be enjoyable, but if you’re at a comedy recording your role is to laugh at the jokes regardless of how funny (or otherwise) they are.
8. To get tickets to the big shows, you may need to go to smaller ones
The bigger sites like Applause Store are contracted to find audiences both for the big, popular shows, and for new, less-exciting-sounding shows. To encourage people to go to these new shows, you may be offered a deal – go to relatively unknown show X, and get priority tickets to big show Y. Whilst this could mean sitting through a rubbish game show to be broadcast during the daytime on a little-watched digital channel, you will be doing the audience company a favour and so they will be more likely to offer you the chance to see the bigger shows.
9. Tickets for the big shows go quickly
And by quickly I mean within hours. A show like Have I Got News For You will fill up all of its audience seats for a whole series in less than a day, so join Hat Trick’s email list to find out what time the tickets go on sale, and then get them as soon as you can.
10. It takes longer to record a show than it does to broadcast
A half hour TV show may take nearly two hours to record – what you see on TV is the edited highlights. Before the recording starts, there is usually a warm-up act, and at the end of the recording, any bits that didn’t tape properly or were missed out will be re-recorded. Live recordings will fill the allotted time, of course, but bearing in mind that most recordings are done in the evening, it’s probably best not to plan to do anything afterwards. Also, make sure you eat something before, or whilst you are queueing, if you would otherwise miss a mealtime or you’re concerned at the prospect of not eating something for three-to-four hours.
I’m not having a good time with email clients. Earlier this month we learned that Thunderbird would not get any major feature updates in future (development will continue but Mozilla has reduced Thunderbird’s resources). And now Sparrow, my favoured email client on Mac OS X and on my iPhone, has been acquired by Google.
This may not sound like bad news but, alas, this is a ‘talent acquisition’ – a bit like when Facebook bought Gowalla last year. In other words, the people behind Sparrow will be working on new projects at Google, specifically on the Gmail teams, and won’t be doing any further work on Sparrow itself – this was confirmed by a Google spokesperson to Macstories. We can expect ongoing support for Sparrow, but no new features.
The Mac OS X version is reasonably complete in terms of features – in fact, it has just been updated for the new Retina displays in Apple’s latest MacBook Pro, and presumably will work with Mountain Lion without any problems. As for the iOS version, it can do almost everything that the stock email client for the iPhone can do (and more), but with the notable exception of push notifications of new email messages. This was likely to be a premium feature due to how push notifications work on iOS with background apps. Presumably, today’s announcement means that this won’t be forthcoming; similarly, a rumoured iPad app is now unlikely to be released.
Whilst I’m happy for Sparrow’s developers to be recognised for their talent, and presumably Google were able to give them an offer that they could not refuse, this potentially leaves Sparrow’s users in the lurch. Of course, there’s a limit to what you can do with what was always intended to be a simple email client – part of the reason for the slowdown of Thunderbird development – but the iOS client in particular showed a lot of promise that now won’t be realised.
The likelihood of Sparrow finding a new home in Google was slim in any case; Google doesn’t tend to do much in the way of desktop software (Chrome, Drive, Earth and Picasa are the only major exceptions) and there’s already an official Gmail app for iOS, which has been updated recently and, crucially, supports push notifications. And keeping Sparrow going at Google whilst its developers focus on other things would have been a distraction.
I hope that, instead, Sparrow offer to sell the branding rights and source code to somebody else, to keep it going. Or, better yet, make it open source, so that the community can keep it going. On iOS, the jailbreak community have already written various enhancements, such as Sparrow+.
I suppose I’ll have to investigate Apple’s own Mail app in Mountain Lion. I tried to use it recently as an alternative to Thunderbird, but in Lion it feels over-complicated and poorly designed.
Firstly, don’t let the ‘alpha’ tag put you off. It’s not a finished product, and there are some bugs (the Tweet Marker support doesn’t seem to work), but in my view it’s ‘beta’ quality at worst. This is from someone who has done a lot of beta testing in my time, and who also spent part of the week battling some paid-for software that acted like a beta product – but more on that another time.
Secondly, apart from being still in the testing stage, feature-wise Tweetbot isn’t finished. There’s not yet any support for synchronising your Tweetbot settings between your Mac and your iOS device, as this requires use of iCloud and is therefore only available to apps from the Mac App Store that Apple has vetted. This will be in the final release but not in any public test versions. Tapbots also intend for it to support Notification Centre on Mountain Lion, which, as well as being another Mac App Store-only feature, is also not available to test because only a few select developers have copies of Mountain Lion at present.
It’s also worth pointing out that, whilst this alpha build is free to test, there’s no support; furthermore, the final product will cost money, as with the iPad and iPhone apps.
So, with those caveats pointed out, what it’s actually like to use?
Well, it works pretty much like any other Mac OS X Twitter client, to be honest. The main difference between the iOS app and the Mac desktop is that, whereas on iOS, tapping a tweet brings up a bar with buttons to retweet, reply and favourite, these now appear when you hover over a tweet with the mouse. But you’ll be pleased to know that the swiping gestures from the iOS app made it to the dekstop, so swiping from left to right shows the tweet details, and from right to left shows the tweet in a conversation view with its replies.
‘Streaming’ support, where new tweets are automatically loaded as they are posted, is enabled as standard. Along the left column, all of the various views are shown, like on the iPad app, so there’s easy access to your profile, lists, retweets and saved searches. And this desktop version of Tweetbot retains its formidable support for third-party services, so there’s integration with Pocket, Instapaper, Readability, Pinboard and bit.ly as a ‘read later’ service (most other apps just offer the first two and Readability if you’re lucky), plenty of third-party image hosting services (but not a custom one yet) and a choice of URL shorteners. And curiously for a desktop client, you can add a location to your tweets.
The other great thing, for me, about Tweetbot is its mute feature to hide tweets that don’t interest you, and this feature is also present on the desktop. So far, in this alpha, you can only mute specific Twitter clients, like Twittascope, RunKeeper, Waze, GetGlue or any other services which auto-tweet things that don’t really interest me, but eventually you will be able to mute specific hashtags or keywords, or put some users on mute – this is great when you follow someone who live-tweets a conference and would otherwise dominate your timeline. The mute settings will also be synchronised between clients when iCloud sync is enabled in the final release.
All in all, in my opinion Tweetbot as it is now – even in its alpha state – is still better than the official Twitter client for the Mac, and just beats out Osfoora which was my previous favourite (I reviewed it back in March). If you use Twitter on a Mac, and have Lion installed, give it a try whilst its free, and, if you like it, buy the final release when it comes out. I don’t think you’ll regret it.
It is with a little sadness that Mozilla Thunderbird will no longer receive resources from the Mozilla Foundation. The decision has been made to focus on other products (mainly Firefox), and that there’s not much room for further innovation in desktop email clients – especially as many people now use webmail services exclusively.
I’ve been a long-time user of Thunderbird – right back to version 0.1 alpha (then called Minotaur) which I reviewed back in April 2003. It’s come on a long way since then, and is still my favourite email client on Windows – especially with the Lightning extension adding a calendar feature. A myriad of other extensions has also allowed me to customise it how I want.
That being said, in some ways it’s no longer meeting my needs. I use at work – officially we’re supposed to use Outlook but there are many people using Thunderbird instead, as its IMAP support is much better. This is fine for our email server which is Unix based, but if we ever move to a Microsoft solution then the lack of support for Exchange, even after all of these years, makes Thunderbird fall short.
I also no longer use Thunderbird at home; earlier this year, I moved to Sparrow which offers a much simpler and lighter experience. Thunderbird is great for an all-singing, all-dancing email client and great for the large volumes of mail that I get spanning different folders, but at home, I just want something basic that can stay in the background. It may have far fewer features but Sparrow suits my needs better. Thunderbird is still installed for the few times when I work from home, but I may now look into Apple’s own email client instead.
As I understand it, the next release of Thunderbird will be an ‘extended support release’, at which point it will receive fixes for major bugs and security issues, but no new features – at least, not from Mozilla themselves. It’ll still be hosted by Mozilla and, being open source, should ‘the community’ want to contribute patches to it then they will be welcome to. Postbox remains as a commercial fork of Thunderbird, although its £30 price tag is high.
It’s a shame to see Thunderbird fade into further obscurity but an understandable one. Many users just don’t need a desktop email client anymore, because they pick up their email on a mobile device or webmail. Outlook and Lotus Notes rule the corporate roost. That doesn’t leave much of a market for Thunderbird to serve.
Today marks the 30th successive day that I have posted a blog entry. This used to be something that I could do with no effort – in fact, go back to 2002-2004 and I was often blogging several times a day. Nowadays, it requires much more effort.
Back then, there was no Twitter or Facebook. Consequently some of the posts I made were merely a couple of sentences – maybe a very brief commentary on an interesting link. Those sorts of things now go on Twitter or Delicious, with the subsequent digest of links being auto-posted on Saturday mornings. Unless I can come up with a few paragraphs of thought, I tend not to bother with blogging about one particular news item.
Plus I have less time to write blog posts these days. Back when I was at university, I had enough breaks during the day to post regularly. Now that I work full time, I only have lunch breaks, evenings and weekends to blog. Generally, I will write several entries in one go, and then schedule them to be posted on each subsequent day (I actually wrote this on Sunday afternoon, for example). Whilst I have managed to produce something every day recently, it hasn’t been easy and I respect those people like Dave2 who are still able to produce substantial blog posts every day, year in, year out.
I’m going to try to keep on with posting something every day for as long as I can. It isn’t easy, but hopefully keeping it as a habit will help, and you can also support me by commenting on posts to show that what I write is worthwhile.
To which, my response is “yay!”. I really like Tweetbot on my iPhone as it looks good, works well, and offers plenty of features. It can do everything that the official Twitter for iOS app can do, but will also let you use third party URL shorteners and image upload sites, and offers integration with services like Tweet Marker and Readability which aren’t often available in other Twitter apps. There’s also the ‘mute’ feature, which easily lets you mute certain hashtags that do not interest you, or particular clients like Waze, paper.li, Twittascope and various other services that auto-post things on your friends Twitter feeds that don’t interest you. You can also mute users, and you have the choice of muting them for a short period or indefinitely – great for when someone you follow live-tweets a conference that doesn’t interest you.
I haven’t yet found a desktop Twitter client for the Mac which does all of these things as well as Tweetbot, although Osfoora, my current client of choice, comes close. What excites me most is that Tweetbot is able to synchronise its settings using iCloud, for those that use it both on their iPhone and iPad, and so I’m looking forward to this extending to the Mac OS X app when it launches.
We don’t know much more about when Tweetbot for Mac will launch – there’s nothing about it on the Tapbots web site yet – but I imagine it’ll be after Mountain Lion gets released later this month (19th July). I’ll be almost certain to buy it, although I’ll happily keep on with Osfoora until then.
