« Posts tagged Review

The State of Desktop Twitter Clients One Year Later

January 6, 2012 / posted in Twitter / No Comments

In January, I posted a list of complaints I had about desktop Twitter clients, and how they stacked up against mobile clients and the official Twitter website. Several months ago, Twitter user MrBretticus reminded me of that post, and I figured it would be fun to check up on some of the popular clients and see how they’re doing now. I started writing this post then, and ended up forgetting about it. I’ve dusted it off to start the new year, though, so here’s where we are today.

Blu
Wow. Despite having a new version available, Blu really hasn’t changed at all. It still only has four settings (none of which are an SSL toggle), doesn’t let you customize/disable toast notifications, has annoying UI animations, and refreshing bumps the tweets in the timeline making you scroll around to find where you left off. Yep, still crap.

blu

All four of Blu's settings

Seesmic Desktop 2
Basically, SD2 has the same issues as Blu. Not enough settings, screws with your timeline position if you’re scrolled to the top, no in-app media previews, and doesn’t know where you left off when you relaunch the program.

MetroTwit
There have been a few improvements since I last used MetroTwit. The client has always had a wide selection of settings, but now there are options for forcing the use of SSL, disabling Toast notifications, and even allowing you to choose which services to shorten URLs and expand them with. Nice! However, there are still two concerns I have with the program: The unread count is annoying, there still isn’t an in-line image preview, and the UI is noticeably slower to respond (not to mention that going in to Settings, changing something, and then saving results in your columns blanking, forcing you to restart the program to see any older tweets). Happily, clicking on a link to a service like yfrog, twitpic, or most other image/media hosting services (including YouTube) now results in a small in-app popup with a preview of the media!

MetroTwit now also remembers your timeline position after you close the program (sort of)! When you reopen MetroTwit, it will automagically refresh and marks the last read tweet from your previous session with a mark line on the tweet itself and on the scrollbar. Given, it still starts you at the top of the timeline, but this makes it very easy to scroll down and start reading where you left off. You can also toggle a setting that allows the timeline to stay where it is when MetroTwit refreshes.

A fair word of warning, though – MetroTwit does include an ad. Yes, just one. By default, it sits at the top of your Direct Message column and is very subtle. I rarely notice it, but even when I do, I find the ads to be nothing objectionable. If you want to remove them, you can pay a one-time fee of (currently) $16.11CAD ($14.95AUD).

With all of the improvements that have been made, and with the release of New New Twitter, I’ve officially switched the MetroTwit as my full-time Twitter client. It really is that good.

MetroTwit

 

After 5000 Tweets: A Review/HowTo of Twitter

June 11, 2010 / posted in Android, Apple, howto, Rants, Twitter / No Comments

I recently hit the 5,000 tweet mark on Twitter, and figured that it’s as good a time as any to write something about my experience on the abbreviated social networking site. It also seems appropriate as I permanently deleted my Facebook account (well, I’m in the process, anyway).

Click ‘Continue Reading’ below for the wall-of-text review.

»Read More

Short Review: Google’s Nexus One (Rogers/AT&T Version)

April 9, 2010 / posted in Android, iPhone, Short / 2 Comments

Now that I’ve had a few weeks to play around with my Nexus One, here are a few observations I’ve made:

  • I can’t live without the CyanogenMod ROM. Android 2.1 is nice, but the tweaks available in CM 5.x are too numerous to mention and offer many features that go well beyond what the N1 can do out-of-box. If you have an N1 (the TMO version, or the Rogers/AT&T one), get CyanogenMod. You’ll never go back.
  • The screen is, by far, the best I’ve seen on smart phone – it trumps my old iPhone 3G at every turn. Some people argue that the screen has a purple hue to it, but to them I ask, have you heard of Colour Temperature?
  • The last three phones I’ve had (an iPhone 3G, an HTC Dream, and an HTC Magic) have all had noticeable lag on the main screens and when load applications. The N1, both with the stock ROM (that I had left on for all of around an hour) and CyanogenMod simply scream. There’s nothing slow about this phone.
  • For all of those who say that the signal quality on the N1 is crap, please actually get one before forming an opinion. I’ve seen an increase in signal strength/quality on the N1 over the other HTC phones I’ve had, and over the iPhone 3G. Additionally, I’ve been able able to clock download speeds greater than 3Mbit/s on Rogers’ HSDPA network. Not too bad at all.
  • The camera is amazing – the fast auto-focus, bright flash, and fine-grain controls are simply amazing, and at 5 mega pixels, the picture quality is simply staggering for a smart phone.
  • My only real complaint about the N1 is battery life, but then again, I’m always complaining about that (the exception being my MSI Wind U123 with it’s 9 cell battery that gives me 8 hours of use). Under heavy usage, I have to charge the phone nightly. For that reason, I bought an extra battery with the phone, however as I have a power inverter for the car that features a USB port, I didn’t really need to get the spare.

That’s really about it for now. Overall, the N1 is an excellent phone, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it anyone.

Moblin 2 Beta: A Step in the Right Direction (Updated)

September 19, 2009 / posted in Linux, Rants, Software / No Comments

And while it may be a step in the write direction, there are a few little things that just bug me about the current iteration of the Moblin netbook distribution.

  • Power Button – Where is it? The short answer is there isn’t one – your only option is to simply use the physical power button on your netbook. Also, the shutdown terminal command is strangely absent. Thankfully, though, the reboot command is still there. It would be excellent if Shutdown/Reboot/Sleep were included in the options presented when you click the battery status icon.
  • myzone – There’s no way to customize the myzone tab, which is the default location on start up. You get three columns, and no control of them or choice in adding other quick content. Not very handy for a start page, in my opinion.
  • Persistence – The detailed instructions page that tells you how to put Moblin on a flash drive/SD card/whatever doesn’t explain how to add a persistence layer so that your changes survive a reboot. All of the instructions/utilities supplied simply bite-copy the image to your device and that’s that. Supposedly you can use the Fedora LiveUSB Creator to do this, but I’ve yet to try it. Having an official utility would help, and something that I hope to see coming down the road.

So for the time being, Moblin is something that’s neat to play around in – it has an amazing interface that’s refreshing and definitely easy to use for Linux (or computer-in-general) newbies – but still has some growing to do before I’d use it in place of a full distribution.

With any luck, they’ll work on these things for the final version of Moblin 2, or if not that, than hopefully for Moblin 3.

Edit: Also useful information, the root password for Moblin 2 is ‘moblin’. And for some reason, although sudo is installed by default, the standard user (also ‘moblin’) isn’t in the /etc/sudoers file, so you can’t use sudo unless you manually add it. That needs to get fixed as well.