The MonkeyChow RSS reader now has built-in Twitter support. You can click the Twitter icon for an article and it will automatically post the link and title to your Twitter account. In order to see the Twitter icon for articles, you will have to enter your Twitter email and password into the Preferences page. This is immediately available through SVN (see below) and the tarballs page.
For those using svn, please do the following to grab the latest.
svn co https://monkeychow.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/monkeychow
As Sourceforge changed the URLs for their repos, those of you using the older repo URL will have to do something like this…
After being told by a friend of their frustrations with their iPhone 3G and the disappearing media when using iTunes 7.7.1, I myself was hit with the bug. I think they jinxed me with Schroedinger’s iPhone bug: once I knew about it, I was sure to come across it myself. Just my luck, yesterday morning my 16GB iPhone suddenly showed no music or any other media of any kind, but still showed that I had only 1GB free. I don’t know if this is isolated to Windows, but this is how I dealt with it.
Once upon a time, you were able to mount an ipod as a drive letter and play with the files. This seems to be no more. I was able to delete some movie files I had on the iPhone and was able to sync music onto to it! Lo and behold the media appeared on the iPhone. So how to get all that music off the iPhone to resync it and get the music recognized again? Enter iPhoneList.
Before starting any of this, I deleted any music from my Library (they were just links to a network share after all) that was not checked, and then unchecked all the remaining music. This cleared the database from having any references to the music files.
The iPhoneList software seems to be directly related to another program called iPhoneBrowser. The latter is newer stuff, while the former seems to be an earlier version of the code. The iPhoneBrowser software, which I ran across first, allows you to view all the folders in the iPhone’s filesystem and edit. I was able to select and delete music files, but the software seems to backup every music file it touches, even for deletions. It’s a pain to do this folder by folder as it waits about 2-5 minutes for the sync, and there were 50 folders on my iPhone. After 3 folders I couldn’t take it anymore and found a few things that promised to mount as drive letters, but which only ended up crashing without getting to a GUI. Once I found iPhoneList, it was a matter of doing a Select All in each of the 47 remaining folders and then Delete. Still tedious for 50 folders, but much quicker than waiting all that time.
Then just start up iTunes. Before the sync takes place, I can see that the space taken up on my iPhone is now just a few hundred MB. Go ahead and check all the songs again, and sync the iPhone to get everything back on there! Voila, it works! Honestly, this beats screwing around with reloading iTunes and wiping the phone with older firmwares. try this out for yourself if your iPhone suddenly decides not to play nice with the media files. As I understand there are utilities for managing the files on the iPhone for MacOSX, so you should have a solution on that platform as well.
Meanwhile, let me take the time to recommend a really great app for accessing files on the iPhone: Datacase. I’m really loving all these wifi enabled apps, like 1Passwd, Stanza, and now Datacase. I like it so much, it is honestly the first iPhone app that I have paid for. Had I been quick enough, I would have grabbed NetShare, too!
The Apple App Store is a revolutionary addition to the world of PDAs, phones, and web pads. Here are my favorite apps I keep on the iPhone. Note that all of these are free.
Pandora vs Last.fm
I find Pandora loses connection less when I’m driving, but I like Last.FM’s web site better. Having music on the go, in the car, is better than any radio station out there. Still not as good as playing the music I already have on my iPod directly from it, then scrobbled to a site like Last.FM for noting on something like Facebook or FriendFeed. Last.FM’s desktop scrobbling sucks and misses music most of the time - sometimes for weeks.
Palringo
A client for multiple IM serviecs. Will benefit greatly from push notification.
Wordpress for iPhone
I’ve been using it to compile ideas for the past few week’s posts.
Facebook - this gets aggregated into FriendFeed anyway, but this has integration with the camera.
Weatherbug - This is better than the built-in Weather app at showing more local conditions.
Evernote
Web based notes I can pick up on any computer and my iPhone. Better than the built-in Notes app, which I wish I could make disappear.
eBay
helped me sell my 32GB iPod Touch
Remote
controls your Apple TV or iTunes remotely
Bank of America
I check my account balance with this.
Twitterific and Twinkle
Twinkle gives you that twitterlocal capability and has a really slick interface. I used to have Twitterlator but removed it since it’s redundant and less capable than Twitterific. Will also benefit from push notification.
Movies
References IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes. Pretty important this summer.
Convertor
Good for when I can’t remember how many feet in a kilometer.
Shazam
Fun for figuring out songs you can’t recall the name of.
Urbanspoon
Fun for finding a local place to eat.
Aurora Feint
Great MMO style Tetris game. Other games: SudokuFree, Scribble, Moonlight Mahjong, Tap Tap, Morocco, More Cowbell, PhoneSaber, magic8ball, PegJump)
In addition, I keep these Home Screen Links:
Twitter
Their iPhone interface is really simple.
Ping.fm
m.digg.com - Their mobile interface for the iPhone is really nice, but does not allow commenting or voting on comments.
iHaloStats
FriendFeed
Facebook (interestingly, can do a few things better than the iPhone app )
Wunderground Weather (http://i.wund.com - shows my home weather station KNJHILLS9)
del.icio.us bookmarks
Mint iPod interface (http://haveamint.com)
home Twonky Media Server - Can actually play music from my server that I did not have room for on my iPod. The server also does Bonjour and UPNP for my XBox 360 and Netgear MP101.
Grandcentral (Google should really have a native iPhone app for this)
Socialthing - needs to add more feeds, but well organized aggregation.
PollenReport
MonkeyChow - my RSS reader (http;//www.monkeychow.org)
Apps I have on the iPhone that I’m not sure I care about:
NearPics
Fun the first time, but no one really does anything with it
Notes
No good if it can’t sync or save somewhere else. If I can’t cut and paste from it, I can’t port it anywhere else. Disappointing.
Smugshot and ShoZu
Just more photo albums. Need to pick one place for online photo storage and I think Flickr or Picasa should be it. But they need apps that will integrate with the camera, not use a mailing address.
Loopt - Meh
Jott
Thought it would be more useful. It’s a voice controlled note app that doesnt require me using the iPhone keyboard. I might keep it.
1Password
Kind of like Roboform, but needs to link into Safari to be useful. it also needs a way to sync with PCs. I’m praying Roboform makes something like this because I have tons of passwords I use with Firefox and IE that I hate to remember and type into Safari. Especially with the way Safari crashe and loses the cookies.
Keeps you consise
Twitter limits you to 140 characters, like the old 8-bit SMS communications. We tend to get very wordy and I’ve found that I can write the same post in fewer characters than I could have if I didn’t have those limits. My posts fit the defined fishbowl and saves everyone time when scanning their tweets. While FriendFeed is really growing on me, I miss the consiseness.
Simple interface, standard look
Unlike other social networking sites (*cough, cough* MySpace), you can always expect that your Twitter profile page will be arranged pretty much like that of anyone else. The text box will be where it needs to be, all the tabs will be the same, info to the right, and so on. This is part of what makes it fast to use. The iPhone interface is even simpler: it opens links into new windows keeping the twitter page the same so you cn move on to the next tweets.
API and Interoperability
Twitter has made its API public so there are now a lot of desktop apps to choose from, including the Digby IM client I use. I’ve recently taken advantage of the API myself in introducing Twitter support for Monkeychow as I now have a Twitter source tag for my application. Coming soon!
Because of the API, this is also an area where Twitter has left a lot of crumbs on the table for others. Other services are microblog aggregators and broadcasters. Other services are handling the tweet organization for communicating with groups. It seems like something they could be doing better.
iPhone apps
On my iPhone I count three (Twittelator, Twinkle, Twitterific). Portability is a huge plus for a social networking app, and here we have a lot of choices. Using location information from the iPhone 3G GPS is also very useful. We’ll have a lot off apps riding on top of Twitter that will help others get a fix on your location. So, if you say you’ve found a neat Thai restaurant on Main St, your buddies will know where it is.
They were first to the party!
There is a lot to be said for being first on the block to do something. So it stands to reason that it has a good layer of applications covering it and a lot of popularity. This is also likely the cause of the punishing loads Twitter has been experiencing since anyone and everyone can hit it frequently. They’ve implemented limits on how many times the server can be hit per hour, but it hasn’t saved them.
Compared to the “Things I Hate” list this was a little harder. Coming up with things that are not in the vein of “it just works” isn’t good enough and because Twitter is such a simple app, there aren’t a lot of features to like. The ones that I do like, I REALLY like, but there seem to be fewer of them. It goes to show how easy it is to be a griefer.
I just loaded the Wordpress app onto my iPhone. It’s incredible how this device has finally brought about the total connectivity to the online world that we’ve always been looking for. This free app alone can make the iPhone worth switching to if you live for online communication.
Serious text manipulation (bolding text, for example) is not possible for the same reason cut and paste doesn’t work. It does gives you the capability of keeping drafts local to the iPhone or on the server itself, letting you jot stuff down during the day, wherever you are so you can publish when ready. You can also choose to publish on a future date so that a very productive day can give you a few days worth of posts. This can give you time to work on the formatting later if needed. Remember, though, that the value of posting is in what you say, not so much how you typeface it.
With the onboard camera you can even add your own pictures to your posts, which should give us a lot more spontaneous photography. You can use little iPhone tricks to build up that picture library like Home-Power to take screenshots and holding your finger down on an image to save it locally. I see a Creative Commons photo search app coming to help out in this space.
Once the iPhone 3g is in as many hands as Apple has promised, I believe we will see a whole new level of interaction. It really is a complete blogging platform. There is a nice demo of all this at http://iphone.wordpress.org so get blogging!
Twitter is a web service that lets you microblog throughout the day, posting tidbits of information on events or just updates for people you know. However it’s got a few drawbacks that keep it from being as groundbreaking as it could be.
Sparse web interface
The mobile web interface for Twitter is a very spartan scene. It’s purposely light to allow the site to be quickly accessed by its thousands of regular visitors throughout the day. While the regular web page can always be accessed, the site should be used from a mobile device to be most useful. That’s where people will be doing most of the activity that will interest others - out and about, rather than at the keyboard. But the mobile interface makes it hard to reply and lacks many of the features that could be added with a little Javascript. This pretty much restricts you to posting and viewing the friends stream.
Kludgy replying interface
Ignoring the web interface for now, let’s move on to the regular site. The text box for Twitter allows you to post messages to anyone Following you. You can publically target a message to specific user with the @ symbol and reply to someone by clicking the little arrow on their post. However, moving on to viewing a specific user’s page, it’s not possible to reply to a post without using a custom Javascript bookmarklet. It’s amazing that the text box is not available at the top of the site at all times, since that’s really the function of the site. This should be made a little easier to use.
Discussions cannot be followed
Posting on Twitter will, of course, lead to someone replying and then followed by other replies from yourself or others. These discussions are almost impossible to follow once you get past a few friends since there are only 20 or so posts per page. Applications like Twitterific, Twinkle and Twittelator can do it correctly. FriendFeed does a spectacular job of handling replies and aggregating dozens of services. How can Twitter itself not be able to present the same data in another format on its own pages? There needs to be a way to follow threads of discussion without making the user jump through hoops.
Interoperability
Another role that has been left up to other web sites is making Twitter interoperable with other sites. Why does a service like ping.fm exist when Twitter is the keeper of that data? Rather than using Twitter as a hub of your discussions, it is just an endpoint for the data from sites like ping.fm and a source for aggregator sites like FriendFeed. It should be able to receive data from a blog and post to LinkedIn and/or vice versa, all configurable from its settings page. Twitter seems content to just be a conduit for data, fading into the background where it will not have direct user interaction. It will just be a database tier, allowing other web services to provide the front-end tier where any revenue is most likely to be generated.
Unreliable
Despite the the lightness of the web interface, Twitter is somehow unable to scale as its popularity grows. These days Twitter frequently displays the Fail Whale instead of its expected services. A number of changes have been made to improve the infrastructure, even as far as abandoning its Ruby on Rails for PHP, but something still seems fundamentally wrong. Most services would have been abandoned by now for being so unreliable, but its audience has fallen in love with it after it first exploded onto the scene and few are jumping ship. Twitter is getting a lot of free passes so hopefully it can capitalize on its extra chances.
Because of the above issues, there are plenty of other services like identi.ca and FriendFeed ready to move in and eat Twitter’s lunch. Without these issues, Twitter could be a reliable, full-featured service that other sites depend on, and which users can use from anywhere they are active. It could then consider charging money for Premium services such as featured microblogs, additional storage, more page customization, or better appearance rates in searches.
In my next post, I’ll give you 5 reasons why I love Twitter.
At 8pm PDT on July 17, 2008, a recruiter named Pradipta Archiputra emailed out to a list of 416 people using only the power of the CC line as Max Archie. This single Internet event brought together a community of strangers in what can only be described as historic. A Google Groups page for Pradipta’s Rolodex was thrown up, a Twitter page, and a dedicated domain was established to celebrate the occasion for all posterity. I am one of the Pradipta 416!!
Having grabbed an iPhone 3G on Friday, I spent some time over the past few days making tweaks and changes to what was already done to support the previous model iPhone. Below are the results. As you can see, the iPhone 2.0 firmware now seems to support the .ico image format which was a really ugly eyesore with the previous version. These changes affect iPod Touch with the new 2.0 firmware as well. The tarball with the latest updates is available here.
CooperFlags.com has a great deal on 18 badges at $6.44 each including shipping. They have better deals if you order more badges, ideal for large club orders. My design finally came in and can be seen below. If you’re a Mini owner and want to trade a custom badge for one, or just want to buy one ($8 + shipping ~$0.84), drop me a line.
