Are you tired of being distracted by the internet? Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Google Earth could all be considered "distractions" or "time wasters." So, if you're looking to get some work done without physically un-pluging from the internet then Freedom might be what you need.
Freedom allows you to set a time limit for internet access. For instance, if I need to set aside 30 minutes for a project that doesn't require internet access, I could tell Freedom to block internet access for those 30 minutes, Freedom will then disable WiFi and ethernet access for 30 minutes. After the 30 minutes are over your WiFi and ethernet access will be restored.
Our favorite little blue bird has been getting a lot of attention on the Apple site, thanks to its upcoming appearance in the new iPhone/iPod App Store. In their blog, Gedeon Maheux of the Iconfactory talks about the native version of Twitterrific for iPhone and iPod touch.
"We feel both excited and privileged to be a part of the new App Store and are committed to bringing our users the best software we can offer," he writes.
According to Ged, the pricing displayed on the site is "for position only": meaning no decisions have been made about pricing yet. Also, expect Twitterrific to work across EDGE, 3G, and WiFi networks.
In related news, Twitter survived the onslaught of WWDC! Hooray! A short service interruption in their data center caught them off guard, but otherwise they were up for 97.3 percent of the day. Twitter received an order of magnitude more traffic yesterday than they do normally.
In the Venn diagram of users, the intersection of "Mac" and "Twitter" appears to be quite large. Why this is, I'm not sure, but it's true that many Mac users rely on the short-message broadcasting service for their day-to-day lives.
There's someconcern in both communities that the flood of new tweets about announcements at tomorrow's WWDC will break the back of the Twitter infrastructure. Their uptime has been mostly in the 90s this month, with some features still disabled for performance reasons.
Do you think it will hold up? What will do you if Twitter grinds itself into metal shavings?
A poll and results, plus more updates (!!) allafter the jump.
If the iPhone has done anything, it's brought prominence to location-based computing. Where you compute has become as important as what you compute. A few months back, I helped out a TUAW reader by building a location application called Findme. It automatically fed the iPhone's location to Twitter, providing an emergency fallback in case the iPhone was lost or stolen.
How people started using Findme really took me by surprise. Read on to find out why.
In a Memorial Day treat for users, Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster announced viaa tweet earlier this evening that a beta of Delicious Library 2 is now available for download and purchase. We've been waiting eagerly for DL2 for quite a while now, along with everyone else.
Interestingly, on first launch of the new beta you're presented with the dialog on the right. Apparently DL2's scrolling and display performance relies on fixes delivered in Mac OS X 10.5.3 -- that is, fixes you can't get yet in an OS build that hasn't shipped. Patience is a virtue, I suppose.
Update: Wil Shipley replies below. The beta test is of the integrated store functionality in DL2; the software itself is not launched yet, so be cautious.
Are you so addicted to RSS, Mail, and Twitterrific that you just can't stand when your screen saver launches? Status Screen Saver might just be the screen saver for you. The awesome thing about this screen saver is that is displays your current unread Mail count, unread NetNewsWire feeds, and even unread tweets from Twitterrific. You can select a screen saver that you have installed in the Status Screen Saver options.
Even better, Status Screen Saver allows you to (with some AppleScripting) create your own "modules" which opens up unlimited possibilities to what can be shown in Status Screen Saver. So, if you use something other than the supported applications, you can (if the application is scriptable) make an AppleScript to give a number, then place it in the Screen Saver.saver/Contents/Resources/ directory.
Overall, this is a really cool screen saver which can be expanded upon by the user. You can download this free (donations accepted) screen saver by visiting the developer's website.
Attention all bloggers! The nerd bunnies at Brainjuice have just released Blogo 1.1, the latest take on their Mac OS X blogging tool. Blogo 1.1 now includes support for Drupal and Twitter in addition to WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, typo, and MovableType.
The new Twitter support allows users to post tweets and direct messages from Blogo, and can even send a tweet whenever you post. Brainjuice has fixed some existing issues, as well as adding these new features:
Support for raw image formats
Integration with NetNewsWire and Safari
Use of Growl for all user notifications
New text formatting options (quotes, lists, aligned, justified)
Custom cropping of thumbnails independently of the full-size images
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.
Are you tired of being distracted by the internet? Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Google Earth could all be considered "distractions" or "time wasters." So, if you're looking to get some work done without physically un-pluging from the internet then Freedom might be what you need. 
Our favorite little blue bird has been getting 
In the Venn diagram of users, the intersection of "Mac" and "
If the iPhone has done anything, it's brought prominence to location-based computing. Where you compute has become as important as what you compute. A few months back, I helped out a TUAW reader by 
In a Memorial Day treat for users, Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster 
Are you so addicted to RSS, Mail, and Twitterrific that you just can't stand when your screen saver launches? 
Attention all bloggers! The nerd bunnies at 
We at TUAW HQ definitely have an obsession with 
Many of have been waiting for a native iPhone twitter client for a long time. And while we wait for Craig Hockenberry's 
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, 
The shiny goodness that is the Iconfactory's 
