Monthly Archives: September 2010
Yay! Copy of the updated for EF4 Programming Entity Framework by @julielerman has just turned up.
Twittering on an iPad
As with most other app categories, accessing Twitter from an iPad has been playing catch-up. The big missing player before this week has been Twitter itself, who whilst they had been providing a well regarded and popular iPhone application, and had been giving hints at what we might expect from the iPad, hadn’t as yet put anything forward.
When we first got our iPad I had been using the venerable Twitteriffic, which much as they had with the iPhone made it to market early providing a very nice looking and slick advert supported experience. I’d certainly recommend Twitteriffic if you’ve got fairly straightforward requirements for your tweeting, but for my purposes it lacks a couple of important features, in particular the ability to manage lists.
As a result I started to look around for an alternative. I found that in the form of Osfoora and it’s iPad version (currently withdrawn from the app store) which provided an impressive iPad experience giving the full gamut of Twitter features in a nice interface. Being a later arrival they’ve obviously drawn inspiration from the many existing clients, taking the best features of each. However the big problem is the robustness of the application, a good example of this being what happened a week or so ago when the Twitter API on which all third-party clients rely started periodically returning nulls in it’s datastream. Whilst longer established clients such as Twitteriffic and Twitter for iPhone didn’t have a problem Osfoora just crashed totally once it encountered one of these nulls and would then crash on opening. A reinstall would solve the problem up to the point it encountered another null, at which point it would fall flat on it’s face again. There are similar glitches and hiccups at other points, and it does have a propensity to crash when it encounters a problem, however until this week it has been my client of choice on the iPad and iPhone. If you need the advanced features I’d certainly recommend giving it a look – aside from the stability hiccups, the other annoyance with it is that unlike Twitteriffic and the Official Twitter app, Osfoora and Osfoora HD are sold and charged separately rather than being released as a universal application.
This week that changed when the Official Twitter app updated to a universal app providing an iPad interface, not not quite universal acclaim. Whilst some people loved it, others like Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) really didn’t.
I’ve been using it on the iPad for the past few days, and to be honest I rather like it. Swapping back to Osfoora HD with it’s more traditional buttons I miss the new style interface.
The iPad interface on the Official Twitter app makes heavy use of multitouch gestures, so the pinch gesture is used on tweets to see the conversation that the tweet is part of, or to view more detail about the person who has sent the tweet. The other interface innovation is a system of sliding panels. Starting with the basic account details on the left hand side, as you click on firstly a stream, and then individual tweets new panels slide in from the right, and can be slid back to the right as required. It’s a bit different to the other clients that tend have fixed panel areas, and does take a little getting used to, but it does seem a lot more fluid within the environment of the iPad. The panel idea even extends as far as linked content – pretty well everything that is linked to a tweet is shown in an embedded browser panel that can be slid in and out as with any other panel.
The main downside so far is that it is lacking in certain features, again proper list support. It is a bit of a surprise considering that as a universal app the iPhone version that includes the self same missing features is part of the same executable. However as those features are there but not enabled it does seem likely that they will be added in the near future.
Having said that, whilst the missing features are an annoyance, a really big advantage is that the the Official Twitter app is really stable – it hasn’t crashed once, whilst Osfoora HD which I’ve gone into a couple of times to manipulate lists managed to crash even with that small amount of usage. The other advantage of course is that it’s free.
In the medium term, I suspect I’ll continue as I have done on the iPhone with a couple of Twitter applications installed, currently the Official Twitter app and Osfoora HD – whether I can cut that to only one longer term once the missing features in the Official Twitter app are enabled remains to be seen, but for the moment the Official Twitter app is my twitter client of choice.
Apple TV – Steve What Have You Done?
Today was the September Apple Event, when Steve Jobs stood up in front of the worlds media and showed them what Apple will be selling this festive season.
This year, as expected we got a revamped iPod range, with a touchscreen iPod Nano, an iPod Touch that picks up features from the iPhone 4, and a revamped version of iTunes. To support all of that we also have iOS 4.1 on the way, which hopefully will work a lot better on my iPhone 3G, and a preview of iOS 4.2.
But the big news was the demise of the original Apple TV.
The Apple TV was always a bit of a Marmite product, loved by some, loathed by many.
Many people bemoan it’s limited functionality, in particular the limited number of media formats it supports, and the fact that the only device that can play media from the built in 40Gb or 160Gb hard drive is the Apple TV itself. However within it’s limited parameters it does exactly what it says on the tin, and does it very well.
I have to say here that we have one of the 160Gb models, and it gets a good deal of use. It holds a large proportion of our main iTunes database including hours and hours of music, several TV series for the children, a number of digital copies of movies, plus quite a few video and audio podcasts. We’ve also on a number of occasions rented movies and watched them using the device.
The new Apple TV is a bit different. It is a massively smaller device – about 80% according to the Apple website – and they’ve done this by leaving out the hard drive totally. Essentially this is now a media extender. As now it can stream content off a networked Mac, and as a new party piece can stream content off an iPhone or iPad. You can still rent movies, and now TV shows on it, but rather than download and watch, Apple seem to think that you can watch them streaming straight off the Internet.
Now I don’t know what the broadband connection is like in Palo Alto, but my first response sat in semi-rural England is you must be joking.
We’re fairly lucky, we’re pretty close to the telephone exchange, but thanks to the lousy BT infrastructure we can get between 5 and 7.5Mbps. Our ISP is pretty good but still, watching the current HD trailers is a bit of a struggle on our connection. The idea that watching a HD movie in the same way will be in any way a pleasurable experience is laughable. Plus with the limited broadband deals that many people use the idea of “watching as many times in 48 hours as you like” rapidly wears off when you realise that it’s download the file over and over again every time you watch it – the current Apple TV downloads the file ONCE and then deletes itself at the end of 48 hours.
Granted if you live in a cable equipped urban area or are lucky enough to be in a 20Mbps ADSL area you might be better off, but still the idea of “All Streaming, No Hassle” is anything but for large numbers of people in the UK, and I suspect similar numbers of people who live outside urban areas in the USA as well.
For us, the only realistic option is to stream from another device on a local network – in our case that will be the main Mac hosting the iTunes database. That’s all very well, but it’s a total pain – the Mac has to be booted up and logged on so that the new Apple TV can access it – the new Apple TV may have wonderfully low power consumption, but it’s worth nothing if you’re having to run a Mac or PC to provide the content.
And just one final little annoyance – the new box is now so small that the connectivity choice is HDMI or HDMI – I’m using composite cables…
So, yes Steve Jobs, I’m terribly impressed by how small it is, but it’s really a retrograde step for existing Apple TV users like me. Having said that, if you’d announce a media server that could host up a central iTunes database…