mac

Mac-less

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On Sunday last week, I packed my Mac up ready to move to our new house. 10 days on and it’s still packed up.

The main reason is that my computer desk will be in the dining room and we haven’t painted all of the walls in there yet. I’d rather not unpack my computer until the painting is done so that I don’t damage it, but it’s going to be a week or two before we’re at that stage. So, in the meantime, my computer stays in its box.

What surprised me is how well I’ve been able to manage without it. Normally my Mac is on all the time, and although I put it to sleep when I’m out, I usually use it every day before and after work. But I’ve been mostly coping fine with my iPad and iPhone instead.

95% of what I do on my Mac, I can do on my iOS devices. The main things I use a computer for are social media, reading feeds and articles, email, a bit of photo editing and playing World of Warcraft. Most of these things can be done on my iPad or iPhone as easily as they can on my computer.

Obviously I haven’t been able to play World of Warcraft in that time, and I’ve had to put off editing photos for now. Writing blog posts is possible on my iPad but it’s not as easy as on a proper computer. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised at just how replaceable my Mac has ended up being.

We also haven’t unpacked the TV for similar reasons. Watching Saturday’s episode of Doctor Who on my iPad wasn’t as great as it would’ve been on a proper TV, but it was acceptable.

Eventually we’ll have all of the painting done and we can go back to having a TV and desktop computer and be a normal household again, and I’m looking forward to it. But it’s not been nearly as disruptive as I’d expected it to be.

Tweetbot for Mac coming soon

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A screenshot of Tweetbot running on a Mac desktop

A couple of weeks ago, the above image was posted by Mark Jardine, one of the developers at Tapbots, showing off his new MacBook Pro with Retina Display. What’s notable is that it shows an OS X desktop version of Tweetbot, my favourite iOS Twitter client. This is big news, and Tapbots later confirmed to The Verge that a full mac version is under development.

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.