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Posts tagged with "twitter"

Social Radio Reads Your Friends’ Status Updates Aloud

Social Radio for iPhone is a new app developed by @anshuchimala which is available at $0.99 in the App Store. And it has to be one of the weirdest, most original and useful utilities for Twitter and Facebook I’ve seen in a while. Or should I say “listened to”. This app, in fact, once granted authorization to access your Twitter and Facebook timelines, can read your friends’ status messages aloud. And, you can control the app with your voice, too. That’s it.

What’s cool about Social Radio, besides the fact that it’s developed by our friend Anshu, is that it looks minimal, it’s got Helvetica and it really reads Twitter and Facebook with iOS’ built-in accessibility features. I also appreciated the fact that each status updates comes with the original author, so you’ll listen to the app say something like “Federico Viticci wrote”. Usernames will be spoken aloud, http:// links will be excluded. Smart. The app plays a continuos stream of messages from your timeline starting from the most recent ones, until you hit pause or tell it to stop. You can swipe on the screen to move between status updates or just let Social Radio do its job and auto-play them.

Social Radio may look like a silly experiment to get iOS to read Twitter and Facebook messages. If you think about it, though, the app can be very useful for the visually impaired (just set it up once, then listen to it) or for when you’re driving and you really want to stay on top of your social networks.

Social Radio is a cool app that can be yours for just .99 cents. Give it a try.

Promises Kept: MacHeist Offers Exclusive Access To Secret Twitter Features

Purchased the second nanoBundle from MacHeist? You were promised a beta of Tweetie 2, but since that never happened, Twitter for Mac arrived with no signs of exclusive benefits right? Think again. MacHeist has kept their promise by giving purchasers exclusive access to beta, or features in progress for Twitter for Mac. Users who didn’t buy the nanoBundle cannot have access due to the how enabling the secret features work. MacHeist members, keep an eye on your email for how to activate your beta features for Twitter for Mac.

[via MacHeist]

Twitter for Mac Review: Love It, Hate It, Tweet It

At some point in the past months, I thought I would never had the chance to write this review. But it’s happening. Twitter for Mac, what you expected to be called Tweetie 2.0 before Atebits became part of Twitter, is now live in the Mac App Store. It’s available for free here.

Like I said, months ago an idea started to grow on me: Tweetie 2.0 for Mac, the way I saw it back then, was never going to happen. Kaput. Vaporware. Twitter killed it, and with it – Loren Brichter’s enthusiasm and passion and willingness to provide millions of Mac users out there the sequel to what I think it’s still one of the finest Twitter clients ever created for the platform. And it’s not that the term “sequel” doesn’t apply really well to this whole saga: Twitter acquired Atebits but Loren had promised that MacHeist customers would get early access to Tweetie 2; Tweetie for iPhone was rebranded; the guy even started making promises and interviews about an app that “was coming”. Just like in the best stories of sequels that seem to never happen, people began to lose faith in Brichter, Twitter and Tweetie 2.0. They moved on. Read more

Twitter for Mac Is Live In The Mac App Store

Finally, it happened. Twitter for Mac, a.k.a Tweetie 2, is now available in the Mac App Store. It’s available here, for free. The long anticipated sequel to the original Tweetie for Mac marks a huge milestone for Twitter, and we’ll have a in-depth review later today.

In  the meantime, go download the app here and enjoy.

Echofon Acquired By PostUp (Who’ve Previously Acquired Twidroyd)

When Tweetie started to fall on the feature front, I immediately switched to Echofon and haven’t looked back. Why would you settle with an old, featureless, and bulky Twitter client like Tweetie when you can have a fast, streamlined, and full fledged app like Echofon? (It looked pretty, but I was never a fan of the original Tweetie.) Once the Streaming APIs hit the client a few months ago, it’s been one of my favorite apps on the Mac. Today, the company who develops Echofon, Naan Studio Inc., has been acquired by PostUp to compliment their previous purchase of Android’s Twidroyd. PostUp has a Twitter search algorithm that’s implemented on many sites to watch topics (our source TechCrunch uses it for example), and we can’t wait to see what exciting changes PostUp plans to make to improve Echofon.

[via TechCrunch]

An iPad App and Something Else - Meet Flipboard, Again

In case you missed it, Flipboard received a huge update last week. The new version, which I guess you’ve been using extensively, adds support for more services than the initially implemented Facebook and Twitter. Those two got a facelift, too, but Flipboard 1.1 is all about making the app the ultimate social magazine that can fetch articles and media from Google Reader and Flickr – something that loyal Flipboard users have been asking since the first version was released in July. In case you missed Apple’s 2010 roundup of the best apps from the App Store as well, Flipboard is now featured as the iPad App of 2010. To me, it’s an absolutely deserved position and I would have been surprised if Apple had chosen another app.

Before focusing on the new features and the interactions implemented in this update, I want to make my point clear: I do think that Flipboard is the iPad app of 2010, but not because of popularity, success or media coverage. Not because of the Apple commercials or the rave reviews it got on blogs and the App Store. Flipboard is the iPad app of the year because, in my opinion, it perfectly sums up the essence of the iPad as a consumer electronic product: it’s an app everyone can use, it looks simple and straightforward on the surface but if you want – you can make it go deeper on many levels. Flipboard, like the iPad itself, can be seen as something simple, an app for non-geeks, for the non-tech savvy audience that wants an aggregator of social content. I’m sure thousands of users think of Flipboard that way, and use it that way. Just like I know millions of people see the iPad as a simple and enjoyable alternative to the most complicated notebook. But a question has arisen between me, my followers and co-workers lately: does simple mean casual?

Better: does simplicity represent a weak point of a certain product? Read more

Twitter Just Got Its Most Beautiful iPad App. It’s Called TweetMag.

TweetMag is, without a doubt, the most beautiful Twitter app that ever landed on the iPad. Yes, TweetMag is  more attractive than Flipboard. But they are two different apps. And there’s no way I’m going to focus this review on a comparison between them.

Let me get this out quickly before I dive deeper into this piece of software that appeared on the App Store tonight: Flipboard and Tweetmag are two different products. Both in the intentions, and realization. Yes, they both aim at letting you build a”digital magazine” out of links shared on Twitter. Yes, they share some aspects of a same concept. And yes, they can live together. This is not about which app is going to kill Flipboard, the iPad app of the year. This is not a piece about the functionalities that you’ll find in both the apps, either. This is about TweetMag, a product of its own that aims at providing a new Twitter experience.

You notice how the most used words until now have been “difference”, “experience”, “product”. TweetMag and Flipboard have a lot in common, yet some aspects underlying the overall concept manage to put them on two separate roads. That’s why I’m running both of them on my iPad. Read more

Trickle: The “Passive” Twitter App That’s Perfect On Your Desk

Twitter clients for iPhone and iPad, in spite of their substantial UI differences, are basically all geared towards the Twitter power user who wants to be able to do a lot of stuff with his Twitter timeline: check on users’ profiles, retweet, save to Instapaper, search, access lists, and so forth. Most Twitter clients for iOS are aimed at enabling you to enjoy the full Twitter experience.

Trickle, released a few days ago, is different. It runs on the iPhone and iPad as a universal app, but instead of bringing many of Twitter’s features to mobile devices, it focuses on turning your Apple device into a minimal, Helvetica-based, constantly up-to-date Twitter widget. Perfect for your desk, possibly with your iPhone or iPad in a dock. Read more

ReTweetie Adds Native Retweets to Tweetie for Mac

Tweetie for Mac is one of the most popular desktop clients for the Mac, even if version 2.0 still has to show up and the app hasn’t been updated to support Twitter’s latest functionalities such as retweets, lists, real-time streaming. As I said, though, Tweetie for Mac still manages to be one of the most used apps by Mac users.

Developer Nick Paulson, feeling the need of native retweets in Tweetie for Mac and tired of seeing the old “RT @” or “(via @) being used by the app, wrote a plugin that adds Twitter’s native retweet functionality to Tweetie for Mac. It’s called ReTweetie, and it’s available here. Read more