Tag Archives: Software

MacStories Interviews Tweetie Developer Loren Brichter

Nov 10, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Software & Scripts No Comments

MacStories has published a quick interview with Loren Brichter, the developer of the popular Tweetie client for accessing Twitter from your iPhone or Macintosh desktop.

Apple just announced the In-App purchasing system available for free apps as well. Your thoughts about it?

It’s fantastic. From this point on I think every dev should consider going the free route with an internal paid “activation” mechanism (e.g. trial -> full version). It’s too late for Tweetie 2, but I’m definitely going to consider it for future apps.

A few interesting questions are there, and a few hints at what’s coming for Tweetie. Native API retweets will be coming in the next release of Tweetie 2 for iPhone, and yes, it will eventually sync your position in the timeline with the upcoming Tweetie 2 for Mac.

Coming Soon From Atebits: Tweetie 2.0

Oct 5, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Software & Scripts No Comments

TweetieAs I’ve mentioned a few times before, Atebits’ Tweetie for Mac is my favorite desktop Twitter client. (And many people also enjoy the $2.99 Tweetie iPhone application from the same developer.)

What has developer Loren Brichter been doing in the wake of the applications’ popularity? Writing Tweetie 2.0, of course! Tweetie 2 for iPhone is nearing it’s release, and Tweetie 2 for Mac is in the works as well.

At the same time I knew that Tweetie 1.x could only go so far. Like the original Mac OS, it blended an intuitiveness with a well rounded set of features. But the “core” needed to be replaced. Not one to rest on my laurels, I started Project Bigbird, which was a new Twitter “core” meant to last.

What is hoped to be the final beta of the new Tweetie for iPhone has been sent to Apple for approval. It includes the “Project Bigbird” core that has been built into Tweetie for Mac since its beginning. It only works on OS 3.0+, as it has plenty of new features, some of which make use of APIs added in OS 3.x.

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Camtasia for Mac

Aug 27, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Software & Scripts 4 Comments

TechSmith has finally released a Mac screencasting application. Camtasia for Mac is not a port of the popular Camtasia Studio software, but an entirely new application that has many of the same features, but has its fair share of differences.

Camtasia for Mac

From the feature set, it seems like its placing itself as a competitor to ScreenFlow. The interface looks good, and the SmartFocus feature sounds intriguing.

The software sells for $99 from Camtasia at the present, though it will increase to $149 after December 31.

Tweetie for Mac: OSX-Native Twitter Client

May 29, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Featured, Software & Scripts 2 Comments

I’ve been trying out Tweetie for Mac lately. It’s a Mac OSX-native Twitter client with a very nice, polished interface. It has many of the features of Nambu, but it lacks the instability that Nambu tends to have from its current “beta” status.

Tweetie supports multiple Twitter accounts, and let’s you switch between them with a cool vertical slide effect. It offers the usual basic Twitter functions (friends timeline, mentions, direct messages) as well as some streamlined search abilities, including the ability to save favorite searches that you frequently track.

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MacHeist 3 Bundle

Mar 31, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Software & Scripts One Comment

This year’s MacHeist bundle is available for another few days, if you haven’t heard about it yet. For $29 you can get a bundle of Mac software that usually totals up to $975…and 25% of every sale goes to one of a selection of charities you can choose from.

As more bundles are sold, MacHeist will up the value of the bundle, adding more software to the package. As I write this 17,211 bundles have beend sold, and $157,553 has been raised for charity. Nine of the twelve applications are “unlocked.”

MacHeist 3 Bundle

According to the FAQ thread on the MacHeist forum, you can buy the bundle at any time and still get the locked applications when they’re unlocked.

The new Espresso editor is among the yet-to-be-unlocked applications. That and WireTap Studio are a tempting combo (plus several other neat-looking apps, like Kinemac and BoinxTV to sweeten the deal).

The offer ends at the end of the first week of April, so if you want to score some cheap Mac software, you’d better act quickly.

Evernote: Remember Everything

Dec 12, 2008 by Matt | Posted in Software & Scripts 2 Comments

One software package I’ve been finding useful lately is Evernote. It’s a free note-taking service with plenty of ways to access it. You get a web app, a Macintosh client, a Windows client, a Windows Mobile app, and an iPhone app. Your notes are synced up to Evernote’s servers, where you are allotted a certain amount of monthly storage space. If you’re like me and mainly use plain-text notes, you probably will never run into the limit.

Of course, you’re not limited to text notes, and that’s how Evernote gets you to buy their $5/month premium service. You can store web clippings, photos from your cameraphone or other source, and even audio recordings.

You can separate your notes into different “notebooks,” and optionally create tags to further organize them. A search function lets you easily find the one note you want out of the crowd. You can also designate that some notebooks be publicly viewable.

It’s quite an interesting service, and it’s free unless you become really addicted to it and use the photo and audio note options quite frequently. It’s definitely worth a look. I use it to keep track of ideas for posts here on Webmaster-Source and on other blogs, and for anything else I need to remember. Instead of carrying a small notepad around with me, I now carry my iPod Touch and use Evernote.

FeedDemon vs. MyNT

Jan 22, 2008 by Matt | Posted in General No Comments

As you probably know by now, the popular RSS reader FeedDemon is now free. The maker, NewsGator, has decided to start making money solely off their enterprise customers. So they decided to make FeedDemon available to anyone who wants it (don’t worry, it’s still in active development).

I decided to take this as an opportunity to compare “normal” feed readers with my own MyNT RSS reader. How? I kept a record of the amount of time it took to read my RSS feeds for a total of one week (using MyNT). Next, I repeated the test with FeedDemon. Here is a chart of the results:

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Get Photoshop For $300

Jan 21, 2008 by Matt | Posted in General 2 Comments

Don’t have Photoshop, but don’t want to pay $650 for the latest version? Luckily you have some alternatives.

  • Amazon currently has several copies of Photoshop CS2 (the previous version) for around $300.
  • Here’s a little secret: You can buy a very old copy of Photoshop on eBay (like Photoshop 7) for under $100. Once it arrives, you have a serial number…which you can use with the $250 Photoshop CS3 upgrade disc. So you buy an ancient copy of Photoshop, and upgrade. I did the same thing with Flash. I upgraded to Flash 8 after buying Flash 3. Unfortunately Adobe released Flash CS3 two months after…

Just thought I’d point this out.

Websites as Graphs

Sep 4, 2007 by Matt | Posted in Services and Tools One Comment

This is either a useful tool or a fun toy. Websites as Graphs is a Java applet that renders your website’s (X)HTML structure as a graph of colored dots.

You enter a sites’ URL into the form, and the applet puts a black dot on the screen (representing the root <html> element). Quickly, more connected dots expand outward. Each dot is color-coded to match a group of elements. The blue dots are links, the red ones are tables, etc. The graph shown to the right shows this site (note the lack of red dots :D ).

It’s fun to enter a bunch of your favorite websites and compare them (maybe it is a toy rather than a useful tool…), and compare them to your own as well. Try it out, it’s fun to watch if anything.

Don’t Block Firefox!

Aug 18, 2007 by Matt | Posted in Featured, Software & Scripts 140 Comments

A site has sprung-up recently called “Why Firefox is Blocked.” They claim that webmasters should block all users running the Firefox web browser (sorry, morons, but Firefox is king) because of the AdBlock Plus extension. They claim that users of the extension are thieves because they use websites while blocking the advertisements. By some weird logic, they believe that webmasters should be given the option of blocking AdBlock. Seeing as they aren’t, they think that Firefox itself should be blocked.

There are several holes in their argument.

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