An avid reader of TUAW, Chris Thomson, sent us a link to a Flickr picture (being the nosy people we are, we clicked the link). What we found surprised us -- a Twitter Quartz Composer composition was included as a part of the Mac OS X developer tools for Leopard. "Twitterverse," when tweaked right, can be used as an OS X screen saver and display all of your friends tweets in a graphical way.
You can find this Quartz composition in the ~/Developer/Examples/Quartz Composer/Compositions/XML/The Twitterverse/The Twitterverse.qtz. If you want to add it as a screen saver, just drag it onto the preview in the "Screen Saver" part of the Desktop & Screen Saver preference pane (in System Preferences.app). You can then add your username / password in the screen saver options.
We at TUAW HQ definitely have an obsession with Twitter. We use Twitterrific for the Mac, and Hahlo for iPhone. Hahlo provides great features in a beautiful, usable user interface. A couple weeks ago we got a sneak peek at the beta of Hahlo 3 (titled "the Legendary Edition"), but now you can try it out for yourself. That's because Hahlo 3 was released to the public today. In addition to a completely revamped UI, the new version integrates full searching capabilities via Summize.
To try out Hahlo 3 for yourself, just point Mobile Safari over to http://hahlo.com. It's free and easy to use. If you don't have an iPod touch or iPhone, you can get to Hahlo from any standards-compliant modern browser (Safari 3, Firefox, etc.).
John Gruber's (and my) favorite Twitter web app for the iPhone is about to get better -- if you've been on the Hahlo for iPhone homepage lately, you'll have seen that Dean Robinson is working on version 3 of Hahlo (titled, hilariously for us gamers, the Legendary Edition).
TUAW got to take a look (along with all of the other beta users) at the new software, and here's a short preview running through what the new Hahlo will look like, as well as updates to the system, including a brand new Settings page, inline replies, hashtags and searching, and lots of other cool tweaks and updates.
According to Installer, Twinkle from Gogo Apps is "Twitter plus Location." It's a Twitter client that adds photos and geolocation as well as clickable URLs and Follow / Stop Following control within the app. With it, you can find people twittering near you -- in fact it seems to be using my findme utility to power its location-awareness. And no, I have no financial interest in this thing -- I gave permission for them to use the utility so long as the app remains non-commercial.
I logged in, entered my Twitter account info (yes, the account information is stored in clear text in ~mobile/Library/Preferences) and within seconds, it found tweets within 50 miles of my location.
You can tweet directly from Twinkle. Tap the pencil button at the top-right corner (it's the one that for quite a while I mistook for a mis-shaped lower-case "i"). From there, you can enter your tweet, specify whether to tag with a location and optionally snap a photo.
Twinkle offers a professionally designed interface and good ease of use. The only negative occurred after I mistyped my password. I ended up in an infinite loop of authentication errors and had to force-quit the application.
Posted Apr 9th 2008 9:00AM by Mat Lu Filed under: iPhone
Many of have been waiting for a native iPhone twitter client for a long time. And while we wait for Craig Hockenberry's efforts to bear fruit, presumably in June, it's good to see MobileTwitter from Nicholas Pike which just recently showed up in the STE repository for Installer.app.
While there are definitely some rough edges, it basically works as advertised and seems superior to the Mobile Safari based options. Having the button bar at the bottom, however, seems less than ideal as it's rather too easy to hit while typing an update. Nonetheless, MobileTwitter is worth checking out for the Twitter-obsessed, especially considering the improvements Nicholas has promised are coming.
MobileTwitter is a free download (though much more easily done from Installer) and naturally requires a jailbroken iPhone or iPod touch.
If you're a social-network-junkie (and most of us here at TUAW are to a certain extent), keeping all the services up to date has always been a bit of a chore. Thankfully, MoodBlast (written by our very own Brett Terpstra) arrived on the scene to cure our service-update blues, making life super simple when it came to letting people know exactly what we're doing.
One of the most frequently-requested features has been Pownce integration -- something that's not been possible due to Pownce's lack of a full API allowing 3rd-party applications to post to the service. Pownce has since released a new version of the API with posting, and Brett has been quick to add the service to MoodBlast with version 3.0.7.1, released today. Simply enter your Pownce details into MoodBlast, check the Pownce box to ensure you're posting to it, and click 'Blast' as you normally would.
MoodBlast remains donationware, and is available to download now.
The shiny goodness that is the Iconfactory's Twitterrific has been officially revved to version 3.1, adding new features and bugfixes to the $14.95/ad-supported freeware Twitter client for the Mac. The new version has added 'teh snappy' to improve performance and reduce user kvetching, always an important design goal.
If you've got comments or questions about Twitterrific, or indeed any of the Iconfactory's projects or products, then you'll be happy to know about this Sunday's talkcast -- IF dudes Gedeon Maheux and Craig Hockenberry will be our special guests, live at 10 pm ET March 2nd on Talkshoe. For everyone who wants to know the secrets of icon design, iPhone development or how to make things pretty, this is an opportunity not to be missed. Register at our TalkShoe page for updates and notifications (or just follow @tuaw on Twitter!).
New features in Twitterrific v. 3.1 include:
Growl notifications are now sorted correctly and summarized
New keyboard shortcuts and action menu on tweets
Changing logins on Leopard will no longer hang
Status message updates now work correctly with Adium 1.2
Plugged memory leaks that slowed Twitterrific down over time
The whole rig requires an Arduino board, and it's not exactly for Mom to do on her own (unless of course your Mom is an electrical engineer, which is entirely possible), because it also will walk you through making your own moisture sensor. Once you've got everything plugged in, the Arduino software will talk to the unit via USB and ethernet, and a terminal script will actually send the Tweets out. Unfortunately, despite a quick search on Twitter, I wasn't able to find any plants actually tweeting, but if you have one, let us know.
Way back, one of our readers begged for an iPhone LoJack solution. He wanted his iPhone to "call home" regularly in case of loss or, let's be more realistic, theft. Over the past week, I finally had a chance to give this request some time, and I put together findme. It's a command-line program that returns the location of the cell phone tower nearest to your iPhone. When run, it tells you the tower id, plus its latitude and longitude courtesy of Google Maps.
Still, how to get the location report to a place you can get it... but nobody else can... and without receiving a zillion SMSes? For this part of the puzzle, enter Twitter. Twitter dev Britt Selvitelle helped walk me through the setup for a private account that allows your iPhone to phone home but keeps the location data relatively secure.
To do this, create a new Twitter account just for your iPhone (it will need its own unique email address, separate from your main account, so have one handy). Open the Settings panel, and look for the "Protect My Updates" checkbox. It's towards the bottom of the page, just above the Save button. Check this and click Save. With protected updates, only the Twitter users you approve will see the updates for this iPhone-only account (just you? you + spouse? spouse, kids, and "special friends?" Up to you).
Update: I've put an updated version of findme (findme-better) into the TUAW folder on my site. Please let me know if this works better for location for you. To use, just copy to your iPhone (you may have to use Firefox if you get errors after downloading with Safari), rename to "findme" and replace the original findme.
The gang over at Iconfactory has released a new beta of Twitterrific, the slick Mac Twitter client. The update adds some handy new features like more fine grained Growl control (it no longer takes over your entire desktop with a million notifications when you log in after a break), some new keyboard shortcuts (based on NetNewsWire) and better user control over Twitterrific's window behavior. Of course there are bugfixes, including plugging an annoying memory leak and generally improving application responsiveness (or, as the Iconfactory folks put it: "added teh snappy"). The beta is available for direct download (zip file).
Twitterific remains $14.95 if you want to remove the ads, or free to use with ads.
If you're anything like me, and I know you are, you dream of playing Super Mario Galaxy but refuse to stand in line to buy a Wii (or pay a ridiculous amount for one, or wake up early to get one... ok, I'm cheap and lazy. Are you happy now?). Luckily for us, Riverfolder Software is giving a Wii away on December 15th to one lucky person.
Riverfold, it should be pointed out, is the maker of Wii Transfer, my favorite piece of software that I have absolutely no use for (but with a little luck I soon might!). Wii Transfer allows you to stream/play all sorts of media from your Mac onto your Wii, and it only costs $19.
You don't care about that though, you want to know how you can win a Wii! Simple: if you have a Twitter account simply send a message to @wii and you'll be entered (that's what I did, in the interest of full disclosure). If you don't have a Twitter account it is obvious that you lack whimsy in your life, but don't fret you needn't be whimsical to enter this content. Simply head on over to this website and enter your email, and an email of a friend, and you're all set.
No purchase is necessary, but if you do win the Wii I think you should get yourself a copy of Wii Transfer. It is a very cool app, after-all.
When the 'guilty pleasures' conversation starts late at night here at the TUAW home office (located in scenic Leominster, MA) I always raise my hand for Twitter -- a great way to keep up with friends and colleagues across the country, and watching the World Series last week with the tweets of Red Sox Nation popping up on my screen was a surprisingly compelling experience, like an erudite and very terse version of a favorite sports bar.
Of course, a good bit of credit for the popularity of Twitter with Mac users must go to Twitterrific, the Iconfactory's stellar client for Twitter. Twitterrific is so identified with the service that many confuse the bluebird icon for Twitter's official logo. Now updated to version 3, Twitterrific adds a slew of new features (and a new price). The app now displays @replies and direct messages separately and in color, includes tweet deletion and filtering, a Dock tweet count, AppleScript support, and more (full list in the bottom half of the post). All this improvement comes at a cost, however: Twitterrific is now an advertising-supported app (1 ad an hour), or pay $14.95 for an ad-free experience.
By the way, if you want to get TUAW tweets and @reply to us with tips and comments, add TUAW to your Twitter friend list and rock on.
When I posted about Mac apps in real life a while back, the number one request I heard in the comments was for Quicksilver. And it wasn't very surprising-- who wouldn't love to implement Quicksilver's genius and simplicity in some way for the real world?
And now, Matt McInerney's done it-- he's created this video (from what looks like a bunch of iSight stills-- weird effect and even weirder music) in which, with just a snap, he can Quicksilver up anything on his mind. There's still a few bugs, though-- Garageband pulls up a guitar pick instead of an actual guitar (or a whole garage band), and I don't know what version of Cashbox he's using, but mine never actually gives me money.
iPhone (although I guess we should really say MobileSafari, since the iPod touch can do it too) Twitter client Hahlo got a nice little update over the weekend. Quite a few things have changed, so I'll just point you to Dean's blog to see all the new features. Basically, as he says, everything that you can do in Twitter can now be done right through Hahlo, including timelines, friends, direct messages, following, and so on. Links have been added inline, and now an @ reply is just a touch away. There are also a bunch of pretty links, including hahlo.com/username, which takes you to the username of the account you're looking for.
Very, very nice. Right now, I do most of my twittering through Twitterific, but with an app this nice on the iPhone (errr, MobileSafari), I might not need anything else.
Attention all ye users of Adium, Skype, iChat, Twitter, Facebook and Jaiku - Brett Terpstra has struck again with MoodSwing, his excellent utility for updating your status across all these apps and services. Why do I call it a utility instead of just a Quicksilver action, you ask? Because Brett is now providing both the original action and a new full-blown menubar app - at the request of TUAW readers - called MoodBlast. Both now live on the same download page at Brett's Circle Six Design blog, and they both allow you to update your status across all the aforementioned services at once. While MoodSwing is an action you set-and-forget to work with Quicksilver (though you can reconfigure later), an advantage of the MoodBlast menubar app is that you're presented with the UI you see above every time you activate it, with any services you used previously already selected for updating. The other advantage of the MoodBlast app, of course, is that you don't need Quicksilver in order to minimize the effort spent for online socialization.
As with his other excellent projects, Brett Terpstra provides MoodSwing and MoodBlast as donationware.
We at TUAW HQ definitely have an obsession with Twitter. We use Twitterrific for the Mac, and Hahlo for iPhone. Hahlo provides great features in a beautiful, usable user interface. A couple weeks ago we got a sneak peek at the beta of Hahlo 3 (titled "the Legendary Edition"), but now you can try it out for yourself. That's because Hahlo 3 was released to the public today. In addition to a completely revamped UI, the new version integrates full searching capabilities via Summize.
John Gruber's (and my) favorite Twitter web app for the iPhone is about to get better -- if you've been on the Hahlo for iPhone homepage lately, you'll have seen that Dean Robinson is working on version 3 of Hahlo (titled, hilariously for us gamers, the Legendary Edition).
Many of have been waiting for a native iPhone twitter client for a long time. And while we wait for Craig Hockenberry's efforts to bear fruit, presumably in June, it's good to see MobileTwitter from Nicholas Pike which just recently showed up in the STE repository for Installer.app. 
If you're a social-network-junkie (and most of us here at TUAW are to a certain extent), keeping all the services up to date has always been a bit of a chore. Thankfully, MoodBlast (written by our very own Brett Terpstra) arrived on the scene to cure our service-update blues, making life super simple when it came to letting people know exactly what we're doing.
The shiny goodness that is the Iconfactory's Twitterrific has been officially revved to version 3.1, adding new features and bugfixes to the $14.95/ad-supported freeware Twitter client for the Mac. The new version has added 'teh snappy' to improve performance and reduce user kvetching, always an important design goal.
To do this, create a new Twitter account just for your iPhone (it will need its own unique email address, separate from your main account, so have one handy). Open the Settings panel, and look for the "Protect My Updates" checkbox. It's towards the bottom of the page, just above the Save button. Check this and click Save. With protected updates, only the Twitter users you approve will see the updates for this iPhone-only account (just you? you + spouse? spouse, kids, and "special friends?" Up to you).
The gang over at Iconfactory has released a new beta of Twitterrific, the slick Mac Twitter client. The update adds some handy new features like more fine grained Growl control (it no longer takes over your entire desktop with a million notifications when you log in after a break), some new keyboard shortcuts (based on NetNewsWire) and better user control over Twitterrific's window behavior. Of course there are bugfixes, including plugging an annoying memory leak and generally improving application responsiveness (or, as the Iconfactory folks put it: "added teh snappy"). The beta is available for direct download (zip file).
If you're anything like me, and I know you are, you dream of playing Super Mario Galaxy but refuse to stand in line to buy a Wii (or pay a ridiculous amount for one, or wake up early to get one... ok, I'm cheap and lazy. Are you happy now?). Luckily for us, Riverfolder Software is giving a Wii away on December 15th to one lucky person.
When the 'guilty pleasures' conversation starts late at night here at the TUAW home office (located in scenic Leominster, MA) I always raise my hand for Twitter -- a great way to keep up with friends and colleagues across the country, and watching the World Series last week with the tweets of Red Sox Nation popping up on my screen was a surprisingly compelling experience, like an erudite and very terse version of a favorite sports bar.
iPhone (although I guess we should really say MobileSafari, since the iPod touch can do it too) Twitter client Hahlo got a nice little update over the weekend. Quite a few things have changed, so I'll just point you to Dean's blog to see all the new features. Basically, as he says, everything that you can do in Twitter can now be done right through Hahlo, including timelines, friends, direct messages, following, and so on. Links have been added inline, and now an @ reply is just a touch away. There are also a bunch of pretty links, including hahlo.com/username, which takes you to the username of the account you're looking for.
