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The Perfect Mac Twitter Client

Sunday, April 5, 2009 in Macintosh by slowe | 11 comments

No, I haven’t found it yet. Sorry, I hope I didn’t get your hopes up with that headline. I’ve been testing a bunch of different Mac clients for Twitter, and I just can’t seem to find the client that has the right mix of features. So, in the hopes that some of the developers of these various applications are reading, here are some of the applications I’ve tested and what I like about each one. Now I just need someone to take all these features and roll them into the perfect Mac Twitter client…

  • Lounge: The Mac beta of Lounge takes the cake for the most complete integration with Twitter. From within this application, you can view user details, see who’s following who and who’s being followed, view another user’s timeline, view Twitter search results, private messages, retweets, view the tweet in a Web browser, copy the tweet’s URL…well, you get the picture. So what’s wrong with Lounge? Primarily speed. I’d also appreciate the ability to customize the display a little bit more than I can currently. Granted, Lounge is still early (0.4.1) beta, so I guess we have to cut them a little bit of slack.
  • NatsuLion: NatsuLion feels the most Cocoa-native here, with full support for transparency (which is a feature I like). I can adjust the display quite extensively, and it has a minimal desktop footprint. There are some trade-offs for that minimal desktop footprint, though, and NatsuLion seems the most susceptible to Twitter brown-outs and outages. Sometimes it will just…not work.
  • Canary: This is a brand-new app I just found earlier today. My #1 complaint about Canary is the display of the tweets—it’s just awful. They need a more streamlined and dynamic display of the timeline, like Lounge and Nambu (see below). Otherwise, I absolutely love the solid integration with a variety of URL shorteners—including credentials for those URL shortening services. Right now, though, Canary is seriously buggy. Switching between views sometimes doesn’t work, and applying a filter then removing the filter causes problems as well. Again, this is an early beta (Beta 2), so I suppose some bugginess is to be expected.
  • Nambu: Nambu is supposed to be more than just a Twitter client, but in current builds only the Twitter functionality works. It’s a pretty decent client, fairly quick and responsive. I like that it automatically contacts URL shorteners to expand out the full URL; this lets you know where you’re headed before you click on it (a good thing these days given all the web exploits that are available). It’s supposed to offer integration with tr.im, a URL shortening service, but it doesn’t really work. It will shorten the URL but won’t use your credentials (in fact, it won’t even save your credentials between launches).
  • Twitterific: It wouldn’t be complete to talk about Twitter clients for the Mac without talking about Twitterific. The only thing I like about Twitterific is the AppleScript support. Otherwise, I absolutely cannot stand the user interface. I just don’t like it. Some people swear by it; it’s just not for me.
  • Bluebird: Bluebird is another application that’s just popped up in the last few days. The first time I tried it, it wouldn’t even launch (said that themes were missing); the second time I tried it, it worked. The themes are supposedly the big thing; you can use standard CSS/XHTML to style the appearance of the tweet timeline. Otherwise, it’s a very early build (Beta 1, I think) and it shows.
  • EventBox: I received a free build of EventBox from MacHeist, but I couldn’t get it to work. It would never even connect to Twitter.

So that’s where things stand. What would the perfect Mac Twitter client possess?

  • The extensive Twitter integration of Lounge
  • The smooth UI of NatsuLion blended with Lounge and Nambu
  • The URL shortening services integration of Canary
  • The AppleScript support of Twitterific

That would, in my opinion, create the perfect Mac Twitter client.

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Welcome to Hyper9!

Monday, March 23, 2009 in General, Virtualization by slowe | No comments

I’d like to welcome our second sponsor, Hyper9! As you know, Hyper9 recently launched their flagship search-based administration product. I’m excited to be able to partner with them and I appreciate their sponsorship of the site.

If there are any other companies out there that may be interested in sponsoring the site, I have a few spots still remaining. Feel free to contact me if you want more information.

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Site Maintenance

Wednesday, March 18, 2009 in General by slowe | No comments

The site will be going down for site maintenance on Monday, March 23, at approximately 11PM MST (GMT-7). The site could be unavailable for as much as 2 hours. According to my hosting company (Bluehost), the hardware on which the site is running is getting upgraded. We should see an improvement in performance as a result of the upgrade.

I apologize in advance for any inconvenience.

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New Virtualization Wiki

Thursday, February 12, 2009 in Virtualization by slowe | No comments

Rynardt Spies of VirtualVCP hit me up via e-mail yesterday to let me know about a new virtualization wiki he’s launched. It’s called Vi-Pedia.

The idea behind Vi-Pedia is to gather information on virtualization technologies in one place for easier reference. Clearly, being a wiki it won’t succeed without lots of community participation, so I thought I’d put up a quick mention of the new site to help spread the word.

Free free to jump over to Vi-Pedia and help contribute!

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IT Knowledge Exchange

Thursday, February 12, 2009 in General by slowe | No comments

I’ve blogged for SearchVMware.com a couple of times, and their blog, Virtualization Pro, is hosted on IT Knowledge Exchange. It wasn’t until just recently that I noticed what IT Knowledge Exchange (ITKE) was really all about.

In addition to hosting a number of blogs—both editorial, which is where you’ll find Virtualization Pro, as well as by ITKE members—ITKE also hosts IT Answers. Got a technical question? Here’s the place to ask it. All sorts of people with all sorts of expertise are asking questions and answering questions here, which makes this a pretty good resource. If you’re familiar with the VMware Community Forums, this is similar (but not constrained to a single vendor’s products). If you’re pressed for time, like I am, then ITKE’s e-mail subscriptions and RSS feeds could be a big timesaver.

So, if you haven’t checked out ITKE, it might be worth your time to go have a look.

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VMM Beta 1.5 is Here

Thursday, January 22, 2009 in Virtualization by slowe | No comments

Quickly following the initial beta release of Virtualization Manager Mobile (VMM), Schley Andrew Kutz has now released beta 1.5 of VMM. The updated beta, available via the relaunched lostcreations.com site, boasts several new features:

  • In addition to support for VMware Infrastructure 3 and VMware Server 2, VMM now supports Citrix XenServer 5.
  • VMM will now “gracefully degrade” on mobile devices that don’t have a fully AJAX-capable browser. This new Lite Mode extends VMM’s mobile support to include devices like a Blackberry or Windows Mobile phone.
  • Beta 1.5 adds a new feature called Accidental Touch Detection (ATD). ATD prevents users from accidentally powering off a VM by requiring an intentional touch, measured by a depression of at least 500 milliseconds. This feature will only be available in full mode, not the new Lite Mode.

The software will be free while it’s in beta, but licenses will be required upon release. Active beta participants will receive licenses in exchange for their participation. To find out more, or to see a more full list of features, visit the VMM site.

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Managing Information Flow

Wednesday, January 7, 2009 in General by slowe | 1 comment

I’m picking up a thread started by Dave Graham, his brother Danny, and Stu Miniman regarding how they have organized their workspaces in order to help manage the flow of information. Here’s how I work.

Since my job has me both in and out of the office quite a bit, I’ve had to adapt most of my processes to work with only my MacBook Pro’s built-in display. While I do have a second monitor that I use when I’m actually at the office, I’ve grown quite accustomed to Exposé and the ability to quickly see all my windows (F9), only the windows for the application I’m currently using (F10), or quickly gain access to my desktop (F11). Unlike Danny, this “kool-aid drinking fan boy mactard” actually doesn’t mind the OS X UI in the least; in fact, I find that it tends to get out of my way the most. That’s not a slight against Linux or Windows; the OS is a tool, just like any other, and users need to use the right tool for them. For me, the OS X UI makes sense and works well. Your mileage may vary, of course.

I don’t use Spaces, the Mac’s virtual desktop functionality, because…well, it’s awful. Besides, having gotten so accustomed to being able to quickly and easily navigate windows I’ve found that I don’t need the extra desktops. I used to be a huge virtual desktops fan (just read some old entries here in the Macintosh category), but after getting the hang of using Exposé I just can’t get back into using virtual desktops.

Anyway, enough of that. In my efforts to manage the daily information flows, I use a few key applications:

  • Apple Mail with MailTags and Mail Act-On: The combination of Apple Mail with MailTags and Mail Act-On allows me to quickly and easily process e-mail messages by tagging them and filing them with only a few keystrokes. In early 2008 I resolved to keep my Inbox empty, and these tools have been a key part of actually managing to do that.
  • NetNewsWire: NNW manages all my RSS feed subscriptions. When I review new items in NNW, I only superficially scan the headlines across all the subscriptions. Items that look like they are worth a deeper investigation get added to my OmniFocus inbox for reading later. I currently don’t track any Twitter searches via RSS, but that may change later. We’ll see.
  • OmniFocus: I use OF to manage all my obligations. Anything that takes more than a couple of minutes to handle gets dumped into OF for processing later. A couple of AppleScripts automate the process of getting items into OF from NNW (via a Quicksilver trigger) and from Apple Mail into OF (via Mail Act-On). This allows me to quickly and easily process only two inboxes—my e-mail inbox and my RSS inbox—and track everything inside OmniFocus. I also keep OF on my Mac synchronized with OmniFocus on my iPhone.
  • For Twitter, I’m using a program called NatsuLion, which also has a matching iPhone application. I may dump this for another application, as I’m looking now for an easier (read: more automated) way to share more information via Twitter. It would be great to be able to use an AppleScriptable Twitter client to which I could push an NNW headline, for example.

Along with those applications, I typically have several Remote Desktop sessions, a number of browser windows, iCal, my blogging client, TextMate, and Office 2008 running at any given moment. Between this core group of applications, I find that I’m able to manage—and sometimes rise above—the information deluge.

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A Closer Look at iCal, CalDAV, Google Calendar, and the iPhone

Tuesday, December 23, 2008 in Collaboration, Macintosh by slowe | 7 comments

A few weeks ago I posted an article titled Manually Configuring iCal for Google Calendar and CalDAV, in which I provided a way to configure iCal in Leopard to use CalDAV to communicate with Google Calendar. I’d done this once before, but when Google made the CalDAV support “official” they removed the how-to pages and instead pointed everyone to their application to do it automatically. In any case, a bit of experimentation turned up the right settings, so in the event you’re interested, have a look there.

Since that time, I’ve been taking a closer look at the integration points between iCal, Google Calendar via CalDAV, and the iPhone. What I’ve found indicates that this may not be the optimal solution for me—but it may be just fine for you. Note that this has not deterred me from moving forward with greater use of Google Calendar, it has just shifted my strategy away from the built-in CalDAV support.

Some of the key limitations that I’ve encountered:

  • The “one-calendar-per-account” limitation is probably already well-known and isn’t a significant limitation, but one to consider nevertheless. This will mean more space required for your calendar list in the event you want to use multiple calendars via CalDAV. For those that aren’t familiar with what I’m talking about, the basic gist of the idea is that when using CalDAV with Google Calendar, each CalDAV account is only allowed to have a single calendar. So, to use multiple calendars, you’ll need multiple CalDAV accounts. These can all be the same Google account, but in iCal they’ll need to be configured as separate CalDAV accounts.
  • The big limitation, for me at least, is that CalDAV calendars synced to the iPhone are, in fact, read-only. That’s right—you won’t be able to make any changes to such calendars from the iPhone itself. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the calendars did actually sync to the iPhone, and then unpleasantly surprised to find they were now read-only. For me and how I work, I need the ability to make changes to my calendar from my iPhone. If that’s not a big deal for you, then continuing down the CalDAV route may be OK. Unfortunately, it’s not for me.
  • You can’t move events between CalDAV-enabled calendars. You actually have to re-create the event on the other calendar, then delete it from the first.

I’m still moving ahead with a greater usage of Google Calendar, but as a result of finding these limitations, I’m now taking a closer look at some of the third-party utilities to provide two-way sync between iCal and Google Calendar. BusySync is the leading candidate right now, although I’m also looking at Calgoo Connect and Spanning Sync. If any readers are using any of these products right now, I’d certainly welcome any feedback on how well they work.

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Google Apps Doesn’t Play Nice with MailTags

Friday, December 12, 2008 in Macintosh, Messaging by slowe | 3 comments

One of my most used and most useful applications (add-ons?) is MailTags, by Scott Morrison. It’s an add-on to Mail.app that allows for tagging e-mail messages with keywords, projects, notes, etc., and then saving that information in IMAP headers—if you are so inclined—so that it persists from one IMAP client to another. It’s a fantastic add-on. I highly recommend it.

Unfortunately, I just discovered a strange interaction between MailTags and Google Apps. I recently moved one of my older e-mail domains over to Google Apps and discovered that every time I try to save MailTags data to IMAP, the message(s) disappear from my Inbox. The only way to recover the messages is to login via the web and recover them. The only workaround is to not save MailTags data back to the IMAP server. This is not an issue with MailTags, by the way; this is a strange interaction that results from the odd way in which Google provides IMAP access to mail data.

Had I bothered to do a bit of research before migrating this domain over to Google Apps, I would have found that this was a known issue and is well-documented on the MailTags forums (see here and here, for example). There does not appear to be a timeframe for a workaround, so for the time being I’ll just have to refrain from trying to save MailTags data to IMAP for this particular e-mail account.

Since this is an older domain that isn’t mission-critical, this isn’t a huge worry. Further, since I only use a single IMAP client and typically don’t save a lot of data on the IMAP server, the impact is lessened even more. However, I had been considering moving e-mail for scottlowe.org over to Google Apps as well, and along with that migration I had considered moving more of my e-mail into Google Apps and just use IMAP to keep my client in sync with the server. This would, for example, provide me with greater access to my archived e-mail via my iPhone. With the discovery of this odd behavior, now, I’ll have to reconsider that plan. Anyone have any suggestions?

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Mobile Version Launched!

Monday, December 8, 2008 in General by slowe | 4 comments

Thanks to MobilePress, this site now has a mobile version! If you browse the site using a mobile device—I’ve only tested it with my iPhone, as that’s the only mobile device I have—you’ll get a mobile-optimized version of the site. Enjoy!

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