Icebird: Best New Twitter Client for iPhone.

Right after Twitter announced the acquisition of the popular Tweetie app from Atebits’ Loren Brichter, many third party developers of Twitter clients started complaining that Twitter just killed the platform by entering the market itself. We may have different positions on this, but that’s not the point.

Point is, there are lots of developers out there who don’t care about “the big names”, they just want to keep developing for the sake of it and for the user base they’ve managed to build. I respect these guys. There’s a problem though: what about those that come up with new apps now? It shouldn’t be easy, knowing that you’re just getting started and Twitter is about to release the best mobile Twitter client ever made…for free. It’s a difficult situation, but fortunately there are some developers who love challenges and are releasing their apps anyway.

Meet Icebird, a new Twitter client for iPhone which I’m falling in love with.

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Steve Jobs Doesn’t Want Shit In His App Store, And Neither Do I

Mike Rundle:

“Steve Jobs wants Apple to be the arbiter of quality in the App Store, denying apps that are ugly, poorly-thought, lame, explicit or featureless. He can’t say that in the Terms and Conditions so instead they’re using carefully-worded language that excludes certain technologies associated with the kinds of apps he doesn’t like. Steve Jobs doesn’t want shit in his App Store. If you’re a developer who may be interested in building shit, there’s another platform right down the street.”

Amen.

An Ode To Clipmenu

There are two kinds of desktop applications: those that work and require you to pay attention to them, and those that work and you don’t even notice them.

I have many applications on my Mac, many of them for reviewing purposes, but I tend to keep a very few in the dock and some running in the menubar. Of all these applications I have most of them belong to the first category, they are apps that require me to look at them and perform actions basing on their user interface. 1Password needs me to input some letters in a text field to unlock its database, and Cyberduck wants me to select the proper folder to upload pictures. My action is needed, always and immediately. Without my action, these applications are lost like an empty car. I have to drive them to go somewhere (working with them), but I also had to learn driving them in the past to get used to their system.

Then there are applications that live quietly in the background, do their job without requiring my attention and are there when I need them. From a technology standpoint, they’re not that different. I use these “quiet” apps just like I use the other ones. But from a user point of view, there’s an immensely huge advantage when using the quiet apps: even if you actually use them, you don’t notice them. So I guess that their biggest feature is that of melting with the OS and become an invisible layer of your workflow.

Clipmenu is an application I’ve been using for many years now and, just like the Finder or Mail, is an application I’m highly dependent on, mainly because it’s become so well integrated with the OS that I don’t even notice using it anymore. Any Mac that doesn’t have Clipmenu installed doesn’t feel like a real Mac to me.

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Ego for iPad: With More Pixels, You’re More Important

You have a blog, and you know that keeping an eye on stats is important. You track visits and unique visitors, but you’ve gotten used to monitor outbound links, referrers and landing pages, because you also know that details are important. You track your Twitter followers, RSS subscribers and Vimeo play counts. Sometimes you wish you could track who follows and unfollows you every day, oh wait - you’ve installed Birdbrain on your iPhone for that. You’re a web analytics junkie. You can’t wait to wake up in the morning to see if someone on the Internet is talking about you, just to see if your latest post has turned out to be that success you expected.

Your most loved iPhone application is Ego. And now you can have it on the iPad as well.

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