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Reportage: Elite Tweets On Your iPhone

I really don’t know how many Twitter clients for iPhone are available in the AppStore. 2000? 3000? Most of them are unusable apps, Twitter.com ripoffs sold as native apps or even ugly copies of other applications. Then there’s the elite, the “Upper East Side” of Twitter clients: you can see Tweetie, Twitterrific, Twittelator, Birdbrain and Twitbit walking there. They’re feature rich apps, with awesome interfaces and great ideas.

Now, developing an elitè Twitter app for iPhone nowadays is hard: I mean, you have to face Loren Brichter, and this is not exactly what people call “an easy task”. But a few developers understood that the big deal is not goin’ against Tweetie: it’s developing an application users would use together with Tweetie. Something different, yet usable and sexy.

Meet Reportage.

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Adobe AIR 2.0 Goes Public Beta

Link

AIR 2 builds on the success of AIR 1 by giving developers new capabilities, and even tighter integration with the desktop. Some new features of AIR 2 include:

Support for the detection of mass storage devices.

Advanced networking capabilities like secure sockets, UDP support, and the ability to listen on sockets.

Support for native code integration.

The ability to open a file with its default application.

Multi-touch and gesture support.

New APIs for access to raw microphone data.

Webkit update with HTML5/CSS3 support.

Global error handling.

Improved cross-platform printing

Improved security and support for enterprise and government standards.

Time for decent AIR apps?

How To Export Items From Shovebox Mobile and Import Them Into Yojimbo

Thanks to MacHeist, I had the chance to download and test Shovebox, a lightweight organizer for Mac OS X. Then, I found out that there was a Shovebox app for iPhone too, so I decided to give it a try. Expect a review soon.

Anyway, this is not a review of Shovebox mobile. In this tutorial I’ll show you how you can export items from Shovebox mobile and import them into Yojimbo on your Mac. As you can guess, Shovebox mobile + Yojimbo could become the ultimate data organizer setup: every data you shove on the go can be easily imported into Yojimbo on your desktop.

The process is a little bit complex and it’s based on an Automator workflow I created, but once you’ve set up everything it will take 2 seconds to export/import all the files.

Enjoy!

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BetterTouchTool Brings Gestures to Your Mac Apps

Say you own a Magic Mouse or a multitouch Macbook: gestures are great, aren’t they? You can perform actions by simply tapping / moving your fingers on the multitouch surface and this is a huge time saver in my opinion. Gestures are even better than keyboard shortcuts sometimes.

Now, Mac OS has a big problem with gestures: you can’t assign custom gestures to the applications you like. I mean, why can’t I tell Tweetie to refresh with a simple gesture? Now, I’d hate to say so but..

..There’s an app for that.

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Roundup: 15 Clipboard Managers for Mac OS X

There’s a keyboard shortcut I use everyday, hundreds of times: Cmd + C, Copy. Everyone copies something every single day. Now, if you copy a lot of stuff and you use Mac OS, you should have noticed the lack of a built in clipboard manager which stores all of your copied data enabling you to paste them later.

Fortunately there are many 3rd party clipboard managers that can do this: in this roundup I’ve collected 15 of the most famous clipboard apps available for Mac OS X.

What I was looking while searching for a good clipboard manager was an easy to use app, yet powerful and with a good user interface.

Enjoy!

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How To Create a Lessn, Bit.ly, Is.gd, Tinyurl Desktop Shortener with Applescript

If you daily send a lot of links to your friends / Twitter followers it’s very likely that you’ve started using a URL shortener. It’s fast, easy and so web 2.0 to send a shortened URL, you can’t deny it. But as the url shortening mania exploded, so has the url shortening services: Tinyurl, Bit.ly, Tinyurl, Tr.im, Is.gd, J.mp, there are hundreds of shorteners out there.

Then, there’s the “your own URL shortener” trend: just as I did with mcstr.es, I purchased a short domain and installed lessn from Shaun Inman to generate short urls for MacStories links. Sure, lessn is not the only application which allows to acheive this (Yourls, for example, seems to be used by many people) but I like its interface and installation process more than others.

Now, if there’s one thing all these url shortening services miss it’s a desktop app to shorten links. I mean, an application that supports every service so that the users can choose which one to use.

For this reason I asked @andytuba (website) to build an Applescript for that.

And guess what, it’s awesome.

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