Task Timer, Tico

post from MacNN | The Macintosh News Network on 24 April 2009 08:15:00 PM. © MacNN | The Macintosh News Network

CleanApp 3 ($13) is an uninstaller and system management tool that allows users to delete cache file...

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iPhone Web Audio Playlist Hack

post from Feedburner: O'Reilly Digital Media: Mac on 24 April 2009 08:06:33 PM. © Feedburner: O'Reilly Digital Media: Mac

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dio-playlistshtml.html

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When No News is GREAT News: Analysis Apple
Earnings Call

post from Feedburner: O'Reilly Digital Media: Mac on 24 April 2009 08:06:33 PM. © Feedburner: O'Reilly Digital Media: Mac

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Locavore's Open Data

post from Feedburner: O'Reilly Digital Media: Mac on 24 April 2009 08:06:33 PM. © Feedburner: O'Reilly Digital Media: Mac

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Small Tree Chooses XRackPro2 for NAB 2009

post from prMac on 24 April 2009 07:47:00 PM. © prMac

GizMac Accessories LLC, designer and manufacturer of a unique line of computer racks for the noise reduction of rackmount electronic equipment, partners with Small Tree to reduce noise of rack mount equipment used for networking and storage at their booth during the National Association of Broadcasters 2009 show. Small Tree designs cost-effective networking and shared storage products for professional video and audio editors.

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Twitter Clients Are a UI Design Playground

post from Daring Fireball on 24 April 2009 07:04:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

Twitter’s elevation into the mainstream has, predictably, spawned a backlash against the service. To paraphrase the great Yogi Berra, “Nobody uses Twitter anymore; there are too many people using it.”

The most interesting product of Twitter’s popularity, to me, has been the explosion of Twitter API client software. There are a slew of cross-platform Adobe Air-based clients, including Twirl and TweetDeck. TweetDeck in particular appears to be the most popular interface for Twitter other than the Twitter.com web site. (One could be forgiven for assuming the entire point of Air is to serve as a runtime for cross-platform Twitter clients.) There are dozens of native iPhone Twitter clients in the App Store. And in just the past two months, a number of new native Mac clients have appeared, including Nambu, Canary, Bluebird, and of course, Tweetie. And on both the iPhone and Mac, there’s Twitterrific.

There are several factors that make Twitter a nearly ideal playground for UI design. The obvious ones are the growing popularity of the service itself and the relatively small scope of a Twitter client. Twitter is such a simple service overall, but look at a few screenshots of these apps, especially the recent ones, and you will see some very different UI designs, not only in terms of visual style but in terms of layout, structure, and flow. I’m not saying it’s easy to write a good Twitter client. In fact, that’s the point — that it is not easy to write a good client for something as small in scope as Twitter hints at just how hard it is to write a good app for anything, let alone something truly complex.

Less obvious is the fact that different people seek very different things from a Twitter client. TweetDeck, for example, is clearly about showing more at once. Tweetie is about showing less. That I prefer apps like Tweetie and Twitterrific doesn’t mean I think they’re better. There is so much variety because various clients are trying to do very different things. Asking for the “best Twitter client” is like asking for the “best shirt”.

Also, Twitter is a nearly ideal service for the iPhone. Yes, yes, Twitter was originally conceived with “mobile phones” in mind, hence the SMS gateway. But on a phone without a good web browser you’re missing half the fun (at least for the sort of thing I enjoy about Twitter) because you don’t have a way to follow the links people tweet. I read web sites and email and RSS feeds on my iPhone, but Twitter is the one service where reading on my iPhone doesn’t feel constrained compared to reading on my Mac. Put another way, MobileSafari is a good web browser for the iPhone, MobileMail is a good email client for the iPhone, but my favorite few iPhone Twitter clients are just plain good Twitter clients, with no need for a “for the iPhone” qualification. It doesn’t feel limiting to only use Twitter from my iPhone.

But perhaps the most important factor that has made Twitter such a rich category for client software is that there is so little friction to switch between apps. There’s nothing to import or export, and zero commitment. As Tweetie author Loren Brichter said in an interview with Macworld Indonesia executive editor Aulia Masna, “One of the fantastic things about Twitter clients is how easy it is for users to jump from one to another. Just type in a username and password and off you go.”

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NI Urban Arsenal 2

post from MacNN | The Macintosh News Network on 24 April 2009 06:10:00 PM. © MacNN | The Macintosh News Network

Native Instruments has released Urban Arsenal 2, its latest collection of sounds for use in Kore 2 o...

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ExactScan 2 update

post from MacNN | The Macintosh News Network on 24 April 2009 05:50:00 PM. © MacNN | The Macintosh News Network

ExactCODE has released an enhanced version of its scanning software, ExactScan 2 Professional. The P...

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Tapbots Devs Quit Their Day Jobs Thanks to
Apple’s iPhone

tblogo We know that the App Store is successful (Apple insists that we know, thanks to things like the billionth app downloaded competition that just concluded yesterday), but it’s not too often that we get to put a human face on that success and see what it really means for developers. Apple themselves gave us a look at Trism developer Steve Demeter in a video segment shown during their iPhone OS 3.o event, but how are others doing?

The two developers behind Tapbots are doing very well, apparently. Mark Jardine and Paul Haddad together make up Tapbots, the studio that’s responsible for two very successful apps, Weightbot and Convertbot, both of which I own and love, coincidentally. It’s not so much the function that draws me to Tapbots apps (though they work flawlessly), but the beautiful, unique, robot-themed design.

Jardine and Haddad have, until now, been working on their Tapbots projects on evenings, weekends and basically whenever they have a spare moment. They still both had day jobs to go to, and it would’ve been foolish to throw away a steady income for something as novel as App Store development. We estimate revenue for their apps Weightbot, and the even more popular Convertbot, at between $500,000 and $600,000 to date. Even once you remove Apple’s 30 percent, that still adds up to between $350,000 and $420,000 on $0 initial investment. Not a bad haul for only a 6-month period.

In a post on their blog yesterday, Haddad revealed that in light of their success, both developers are now giving themselves over full-time to iPhone development. The good news is that this means they can devote more time to creating the precious little diamonds in the rough that have made them so successful to date. Not sure if they’re taking suggestions, but I’d really love to see a Calcbot to replace the iPhone’s ho-hum built-in one (yes, I would pay at least a dollar for a purely superficial upgrade).

No word on what the forthcoming apps will be, but they plan on releasing four a year, and will be starting on a new one in May. Meanwhile, 1.3 updates for both Convertbot and Weightbot are almost ready to be submitted to Apple.

While Trism is a terrific example of what a great, innovative idea from an independent developer can achieve on the iPhone platform, the Tapbots story is a little different. It shows that you don’t have to come up with something completely original to be successful. The apps Tapbots creates are performing very basic functions, and ones that other applications often already offer. The difference is Tapbots takes the time to really polish the design and performance of their product, and the quality that results appeals to consumers. It just goes to show that despite the sometimes depressing quality of App Store chart toppers, the good guys do sometimes still win.

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les-iphone/

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Airtel Wireline Broadband 16 mbps Plan Tariff and
Details.

Bharti Airtel Launched a 16 Mbps wireline broadband connection in India. Airtel plans to roll out 16Mbps wireline broadband in Delhi, Chennai, and Bangaluru in the first phase.Later, it will extend to other cities like Pune, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and[...]

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