TweetFire: A Lightweight and Fast Twitter Companion for iPhone

In my review of the first version of Tweetbot, I asked whether it was still possible to bring innovation to Twitter clients for iPhone, a category of apps that have offered more or less the same features for quite some time now, with the focus now being on interface design to make an app feel “unique”. With different takes on the same concept (interacting with Twitter) and with the company itself advising against “regular” third-party client apps that most users won’t install (they say people fire up the App Store, download Twitter’s official app, and that’s it), mine was a legitimate question. Is there still room for something new?

As Tweetbot’s successful launch has proved, there’s a niche of users willing to try out what’s new in the Twitter ecosystem. Tapbots have managed to build a loyal new userbase of customers interested in their unique spin on Twitter clients – these people have stuck around long enough to wait for push notifications and the consequent rapid rollout per Twitter’s own API approval. But I also take a look at Twitterrific from The Iconfactory, another third-party client that has built its own ecosystem across the Mac and iOS and which, from what I’m hearing, is about to introduce great new features in an upcoming update. I’ve mentioned Tweetbot and Twitterrific so far, but there are dozens of clients from both big and smaller indie companies that are thriving in spite of Twitter’s official free tools for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

And then there’s Apple’s initiative with Twitter and iOS 5, which will bring native Twitter access (single sign-on, contact lookup, tweet integration) to its mobile operating system. Users will be able to tweet photos and webpages, addresses in Maps and cool videos they find on YouTube. But they won’t be able to read their timelines, or receive push notifications through Apple’s native implementation. For these reasons, and because it is my job to look out for what’s next, I believe innovation in Twitter clients is far from done (that is, unless Twitter adopts changes that will make it impossible for developers to keep creating third-party tools), and we just need to keep looking to find the next app that may, in some way, improve the way we share information on Twitter from a smartphone or tablet. Read more

Changing OS X Lion’s Mission Control and Dashboard image backgrounds→

Changing OS X Lion’s Mission Control and Dashboard image backgrounds

As soon as I installed Mac OS X Lion I began playing around with all the new features. Naturally, Mission Control and Dashboard were two of the first things I tried. I immediately hated the image backgrounds Apple chose to use and began searching for a way to alter them. It didn’t take long, and it’s quite simple to do.

The linen texture is unpopular with a lots of people, often being designated as, “The new pinstripes”. Personally I like the linen texture as it provides nice contrast against bright and floating desktops and apps, but I’m not sure why it didn’t carry over to the dashboard. The dashboard, featuring a lego-like texture, oddly stands on its own from the rest of OS X as some kind of ugly stepchild. It’s bad enough the dashboard still retains that metallic widget-bar, and Apple reinforces its distinctness from the system with a background that reminds me of diamond-plate — it’s simply unappealing. In the meantime, you have a choice in whether you want to look at it (or linen) through a nine step process that allows you to swap out those gross backgrounds for bubbles, stiching, denim, or whatever floats your boat.

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Safari’s Growth Outshines Dulled Chrome in July

Browser Wars - it’s not surprising that competition for the best browser is always fueled by which is the fastest, most reliable and doesn’t suck up all your resources on your desktop and mobile machines.

According to Net Applications newest report, July was a great month for Apple’s Safari browser. July boasted the largest increase ever, with Safari being used by 8.1 percent of all web users.

Apple’s iOS devices (iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch) make up for more that a third of the usage for Safari. The growth rate surpassed (and doubled) Chrome as well, jumping .6 percent for July while Google’s Chrome only grew .3 percent.

Statistics say that Safari has had continual growth for 17 months now while Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer has been declining. IE still has 52.8% of the market but solid declines month to month help Apple and others cut in to Microsoft’s dominance in the browser market. IE 9 is being used more with Windows 7 adopters but the overall browser share for IE is still declining.

If Apple and Chrome are growing and IE is shrinking, where is Firefox and Opera in all of this? Numbers show that Opera is down to a minimal 1.7% of the web market - this is where it was back in 2007. Firefox is mostly steady but had a slight decline from 23% a year ago to 21.5% now.

Safari isn’t King of the Jungle yet but is making great strides. Apple’s strength in mobile devices and increases in Mac sales will help Safari continue to grow and grow. Safari had a major update 2 weeks ago with version 5.1 that supports full screen mode and gestures (Mac), Reading List and more. The upcoming iOS 5 adds some great new features for Apple’s mobile version like tabbed browsing, Reader and Reading List as well as an improved performance on all iOS devices.

[via TUAW]

Mockups Show Lion Inspired Changes For Future Firefox

Like Google’s Chrome browser, Mozilla announced earlier this year its intention to move to a fast release cycle for new major versions of its popular browser for Windows, Linux and Mac, Firefox. Following the launch of Firefox 4 in March – which brought major design changes from Firefox 3 – Mozilla moved up its schedule and released Firefox 5 in June, just three months after the previous upgrade, adding a “Do not track” feature for all browsers and platforms, as well as other HTML5 and CSS improvements, although the UI design remained largely unchanged from Firefox 4. As part of Mozilla’s new channel-based alpha and beta testing, Firefox 6.0 is already available as beta, whilst Firefox 7.0 has been made available as early developer preview (or alpha) in the Aurora channel. You can read more about Mozilla’s new “every six weeks” policy here.

While waiting for the future Firefox 6.0 and 7.0, Mozilla’s Product Visual Designer with the Firefox team, Stephen Horlander, has posted some mockups of what the future Firefox could look like on Windows and OS X machines. The images, posted as a presentation on Mozilla’s website, don’t necessarily reflect any upcoming feature in the next versions of Firefox, but they provide some kind of insight into the kind of discussions the team is having in regards of what could come next.

As you can see from the image above (more here), the proposed solution unifies Firefox’s top bar to accomodate tabs, a Home button, a new tab button, as well as integrated add-on manager that has its own tab (much like Google Chrome opens its settings in new tabs, rather than windows). The mockups have been built on top of OS X Lion, as you can tell from the window texture and the traffic lights in the upper left corner. Speaking of which, Horlander has also played around with Lion’s monochrome and popovers, implementing monochromatic icons for cut/copy/paste, bookmarks and tab controls inside a settings popover accessible from a gear icon next to the address bar. Another screenshot shows native full-screen support with minimal chrome when browsing a website. On the PC side, the proposed changes are similar, but based on Windows’ default theme.

It’ll be interesting to see whether these Lion-inspired changes for Firefox on the Mac will evolve into an actual release in the coming months. Meanwhile, Windows users can install this fan-made theme that takes some of Horlander’s UI elements, and applies them to the current version of Firefox.

Apple Releases iOS 4.3 for Apple TV [Updated]

Apple has just released a new version of iOS for the Apple TV second-generation – iOS 4.3 with build number 8F455. Whilst there is no official changelog for the update yet, a series of tweets from Daring Fireball’s John Gruber suggests iOS 4.3 brings the possibility of streaming purchased TV Shows, including all the shows you’ve already bought in iTunes. Since the introduction of iCloud at the WWDC in June, Apple rolled out new features in iTunes to let users re-download every single purchase they made with their Apple IDs – this applied to music, apps, and books. With a new tab in the same Purchased section, Apple now allows you to re-watch TV Shows you’ve bought through iTunes. The “Purchased” option in iTunes was announced alongside iCloud (which will launch this Fall) and the broader iTunes in the Cloud initiative – in spite of iCloud still being a “beta” for developers, every Mac, iPad, iPhone and Apple TV can benefit from these re-download functionalities now. Read more

Forbes Profiles Comex, The iPhone Hacker Behind JailbreakMe→

Forbes Profiles Comex, The iPhone Hacker Behind JailbreakMe

Forbes has published an interesting story on comex, the 19-year old hacker and Cydia developer who has released jailbreak tools for the iPhone multiple times in the past years. Namely, the latest iteration of JailbreakMe (which relied on a vulnerability in the iOS’ PDF rendering library that Apple patched after 9 days) has been used over 2 million times to jailbreak iOS devices (including the iPad 2) running iOS 4.3.3. Last year, comex released JailbreakMe 2.0, again based on a bug in the PDF engine, which allowed users to jailbreak devices running iOS 4.

The popularity of comex (his Twitter account alone has over 172,000 followers) and the anticipation that precedes every jailbreak release had the unpleasant side effect of a leak of an early beta version of JailbreakMe 3.0, which forced comex to rush the public release fearing Apple’s upcoming fix.

Perhaps the most interesting part from Forbes’ story is this little tidbit about comex’s background:

The young hacker taught himself to code in the programming language Visual Basic at the age of nine, gleaning tricks from Web forums. “By the time I took a computer science class in high school, I already knew everything,” he says. When he found that he couldn’t save a screenshot from the Nintendo Wii video game Super Smash Brothers to his computer, he spent hours deciphering the file, and later worked on other Wii hacks, getting a feel for its obscure operating system.

“I didn’t come out of the same background as the rest of the security community,” he says. “So to them I seem to have come out of nowhere.

Whilst Apple is seemingly “borrowing” ideas from the jailbreak community to implement them in iOS 5 in a more polished way, questions remain whether the future of the iPhone has much room left for jailbreakers. The way I see it, as long as Apple won’t allow users to freely customize the experience of iOS at the same degree the Mac does, and as long as people like comex will be around, there will always be a reason – we’re not talking about the necessity – to jailbreak a device.

Read the full story over at Forbes. [image via]

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Apple Store Observations on the New MacBook Air

I checked in at 11:35. Late for my 11:15 appointment, the Apple Store representative offered to fit me in at 13:00 for a brief MacBook repair. I could replace the fan myself — which unfortunately wasn’t rattling that morning as it had been in previous days — but there’s too many screws to remove and I wanted an excuse to test out the MacBook Air. For an hour I visited with the both 11“ and 13” MacBook models, getting a feel for the weight and size while opening every app I could, playing music or fullscreen videos, and getting to know whatever neighbors who casually stopped into the Apple Store to check out Apple’s latest machines. You could say the MacBook Air is pretty great (there’s no denying that), but I found the people to be much more interesting.

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The New Yorker Has Sold 20,000 Annual iPad Subscriptions→

The New Yorker Has Sold 20,000 Annual iPad Subscriptions

The New York Times profiles the status of The New Yorker iPad app, which was released in September 2010 but implemented iTunes subscriptions last May. According to The New Yorker, over 75,000 print subscribers have taken advantage of the offer to download the iPad app for free, whilst “several thousands more people” are downloading $4.99 single issues each week.

Offering the first detailed glimpse into iPad magazine sales since subscriptions became available in the spring, The New Yorker said that it now had 100,000 iPad readers, including about 20,000 people who bought subscriptions at $59.99 a year.

In the old in-app purchase model, The New Yorker used to sell single issues-only at $4.99. Since Condè Nast rolled out subscriptions for many of its magazines in May, the publication adopted a new model with subscription to the weekly magazine priced at $5.99 per month (or $1.50 per issue) and full annual iPad access at $59.99. Unlike several other digital versions of magazines ported to the iPad (many of them sold by Condè Nast itself), The New Yorker took a different approach: rather than re-working its information architecture to present articles alongside lots of images, “interactive ads”, video, and infographics, The New Yorker went for the simpler route of presenting readable text on screen. And as The New York Times reports, this strategy seems to have worked really well for them:

The New Yorker, a magazine that has always been heavy on text, took a different tack from its peers. Instead of loading its iPad app with interactive features, the magazine focused on presenting its articles in a clean, readable format.

“That was really important to us: to create an app all about reading,” said Pamela Maffei McCarthy, the magazine’s deputy editor. “There are some bells and whistles, but we’re very careful about that. We think about whether or not they add any value. And if they don’t, out the window they go.

Read the full report – including some remarks from the magazine’s editor David Remnick – here. [via Poynter]

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