I lay my head in the guillotine with this post title, but I have to get this out of the way: If you’ve ever used Tweetie 2, you’ve used Osfoora. And while I don’t want to say it, the feature comparison is so similar it’s not even funny. So with this said, I’m going to review Osfoora as perhaps a re-imagination of Tweetie 2 – what does it do better and what does it do worse?
Osfoora, a New Take on Tweetie
Neven Morgan on Apple’s Design Imitating Real-Life Objects
“After you’ve read your twelfth ebook, you don’t need the candy anymore. Ideally, the candy isn’t so distracting that you hate it, and what was once cute (swiping to flip the page!) turns into sheer utility (tapping to turn the page, which I have to believe will also be possible in iBooks.)
But that flip matters because it gets you going. And it gets going everyone who sees you reading your twelfth book in iBooks. How will you demo it to them? Will you tap or will you slowly turn the page? If your booklist was also available as a boring (and useful) black-and-white table, would that be the screen you’d show your friends?”
No, definitely. And just as they did with the iPhone, they need to push the simplicity effect, make it clear that there’s one and only one way to browse and view books - and that way is beautiful. They could have used awkward thumbnails for Contacts.app on the iPhone, but they didn’t. And like it or not, consistency and simplicity are what made the iPhone stand out.
The Opera Logo, Now In CSS with No Images
Gradients, border radius, box shadows. And it looks beautiful.
New Reference to Multitasking Found in iPhone SDK
“New to Apex, some devices/builds have spotlight lumped in with the multitasking dialog box. If we couldn’t get to springboard the old way, try the new one (it’s just a double-tap of home button)”
I guess that would be the most natural way to activate “backgrounding” for apps and switch back to the Springboard. At least ProSwitcher implemented it in a great way months ago.
Combo: Hooters App Approved, Banned, Re-Approved, Re-Banned
Sneak Around on your Mac with Tiptoe
We’re all familiar with Private Browsing. While I use it for my financial activities, people will use it for more nefarious deeds. Imagine if we can take everything on our Macs, and apply Private Browsing to it. You know, like iChat for example? So if you’ve ever wanted to be super sneaky on your Mac, perhaps to keep your little brother from blackmailing you with your latest GF talk, then Tiptoe is for you.
TUAW: OpenGL 4.0 Announced During GDC
The updated OpenGL release includes enhanced shaders, better texture support, and 64-bit double-precision floating point operations, amongh other features. It offers support for backwards compatibility with existing OpenGL code.
Razer Announces Support for Mac OS X
“Today at the Game Developers Conference, Razer, the world’s leading manufacturer of high-end precision gaming and lifestyle peripherals, announced an effort to increase support for Mac users by issuing driver support for all upcoming Razer products, including the Razer StarCraft II peripheral suite.”
Steam coming to Mac, now Razer. I have the feeling 2010 is going to be an interesting year for gaming on Mac OS X.
Win a Copy of Quiet Read Pro
Quiet Read Pro, which we covered here, is a nice utility which allows to quickly capture any web address for later by simply dragging the url onto its menubar icon. The new Pro version comes with interesting additions to the regular free counterpart, like Instapaper and Read It Later “send to” actions and global activation shorcuts.
We have 5 licenses up for grabs, all you have to do is leave a comment here. No tweeting required!
Winners will be announced on Saturday, March 13th.
Good luck!