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The Twitter Client Project: Echofon
I love Echofon. It was among the first apps I bought for iOS, and remains to this day on my devices. When it hopped to OS X, I was delighted and immediately installed a copy. I'm still using it. Only one problem. Naan Studio discontinued it last October. It still works great, however, and probably will until Twitter drops support for its 1.0 API. My love for this no-longer-supported app, however, continues -- even if it's beginning to feel a little like appnecrophilia. Kelly H pulled me to the side, the other day. It was time for an intervention. Although TUAW has done individual reviews an any number of Twitter apps, she wanted me to start looking at popular clients with the angle of searching for a replacement. It was, she pointed out, long since time to move on from Echofon. She, another Echofon fan, had dropped it a few months ago after Naan said they would stop development. We quickly realized how individualized client choice is. There are things I love about Echofon that speak strongly to me, but may not be essential for other users: I love how I can click on the dock icon and my feed appears and disappears. It's just one click and one window. I love how the layout is vertical, with icons on the top, and tweets displayed using the full window width. I love the default fonts and whitespace. It may not be the prettiest client, but it's extra readable for those of us with bad eyes. I love the customizable notification controls, with highlight words and Growl support. I love the minimality of the interface, like the simple + button (versus, for example, the official Twitter client's huge "Save" button) that transforms searches into saved items. I love that it adds information I want like the time the tweet was posted -- missing in the official Twitter client. I love the conversation bubble integration with the side-drawer. Even better, the drawer has a history feature, so I can walk back. In the best of all worlds, of course, a public outcry would force Naan to bring Echofon for OS X back -- renewing support for a great client. (Hashtag hint: #bringBackEchofonForOSX) In this world, however, I have promised Kelly to start road testing Twitter clients. I'll be doing this slowly, probably one every week or two, and writing up my experiences. If you have any OS X clients you'd like to request I look at or features you want me to pay special attention to, drop a note on our feedback page. In the mean time, let's kick things off here in the comments. What OS X Twitter client do you use and why do you love it?
iPhoneDevSDK responds to attack
Yesterday, Apple disclosed it had been targeted by a malware attack. Apparently, related to a recent Facebook breach, Apple issued a statement regarding the situation: "The malware was employed in an attack against Apple and other companies, and was spread through a website for software developers. We identified a small number of systems within Apple that were infected and isolated them from our network. There is no evidence that any data left Apple. We are working closely with law enforcement to find the source of the malware." By the end of the day, Apple had released a security update addressing the breach. An AllThingsD write-up discovered the software developer website in question. It turned out to be the iPhoneDevSDK community. Today, iPhoneDevSDK responded: "What we've learned is that it appears a single administrator account was compromised. The hackers used this account to modify our theme and inject JavaScript into our site. That JavaScript appears to have used a sophisticated, previously unknown exploit to hack into certain user's computers...We're still trying to determine the exploit's exact timeline and details, but it appears as though it was ended (by the hacker) on January 30, 2013." The site, which only became aware of the situation after seeing the AllThingsD post, is now working with Facebook, the Vanilla forums host and law enforcement.
The Daily Roundup for 02.19.2013
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Holiday Poll: What Apple product rumor do you want to see go real?
It's a pretty slow news day due to today's holiday. A bunch of us were joking around in the TUAW back channels about fake and rumored products we'd love to see Apple actually bring to life. I'm rooting for a Pro refresh, while Randy N's holding out hope for a brand new generation of Newtons. Meg? She's got her eye on a complete iWork refresh. What about you? Vote in our poll and tell us what products we've missed in the comments. %Poll-80925%
The Daily Roundup for 02.18.2013
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
The Weekly Roundup for 02.11.2013
You might say the week is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workweek, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Weekly Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 7 days -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
The Daily Roundup for 02.15.2013
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
The Daily Roundup for 02.14.2013
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
My first week as Horde
I've been playing World of Warcraft for a very long time. Since it was closed beta, in fact. Back when the game was still brand new, I mean right when the servers first opened up, I played for team red. I was a Horde shaman, and proud to be so. My first shaman was not named Lodur, in fact it was what I thought at the time was the ever clever name of Rum. I played with one of my buddies who named his warrior Coke. We played with a bunch of coworkers and friends from college until partway through Classic WoW when they either got promoted at work, graduated or stopped playing. Some of our group though decided to move to another server and see how things were going on the Alliance side of things. Off to Zul'jin we went, and with moving servers and factions in a time before server transfers or faction swaps were around, came a new toon. Abigail, the night elf hunter was born. She's traveled servers, and been race changed multiple times since she was born. I finished Classic WoW on her raiding with friends all the way through the original Naxxramas. I still gave a lot of love to Rum though, and even found time to run him through Ahn'Qiraj 40. When Burning Crusade released, though, Rum fell to the wayside as Lodur was born over with my Alliance family. I hadn't returned to horde except for a brief tour with the Choose My Adventure here on the site, that was until this past week when I server and faction changed my long time hunter over to play Horde side again with friends.
The Daily Roundup for 02.13.2013
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Finding Steve's recovery partition: Solving an Apple mystery
Yesterday, fellow blogger Steve Sande hopped into the TUAW backchannel all fussed. As part of some iMovie troubleshooting he was doing with Apple's support wizards, he was trying to get his new iMac to boot into the recovery partition and was getting nowhere. Holding down the Option key during reboot wasn't showing the volume as an option the way he expected. Has this happened to you? Well, there's a reason the recovery partition didn't show up -- Steve was working with a Fusion drive-based system. We started by checking that the disk contained the recovery partition. To do this, I had Steve launch the Terminal app and enter "diskutil list" (no quotes) at the command line. As you can see in the screenshot above, there was a "Recovery HD" partition listed under /dev/disk1. After confirming the partition, I recommended that Steve use the standard Command-R trick. You press and hold Command-R during reboot to choose the recovery partition. (Using Command-Option-R starts Internet Recovery for completely hosed systems where you need to to install a new drive.) This worked. A few quick Google searches later, we realized that Fusion drives seem to disallow the option-key-then-select-Recovery-volume-to-boot-from trick so many of us are used to. Apparently, this applies to both Apple-shipped Fusion drives as well as roll-your-own solutions. Fusion Drives also use a unique version of Disk Utility. As this Apple knowledge base article points out, "The version of Disk Utility that comes with Fusion Drive is unique. Earlier versions of Disk Utility can't be used with a Fusion Drive."
iBook Lessons: Could Amazon create a used e-book market?
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about e-book writing and publishing. This Slashgear writeup about a newly awarded Amazon patent just caught our eyes here at TUAW Central. Apparently, Amazon may be exploring an online used digital goods market. Amazon proposes to establish an "electronic marketplace for used digital objects." If that sounds a little ridiculous and yet curiously intriguing to you, well, you're not alone. The patent focuses on digital scarcity: As use of digital objects increases, users may wish to transfer the digital objects to other users. These transfers may include a sale, a rental, a gift, a loan, a trade, etc. However, several problems manifest when transferring a digital object. While a physical object such as a copy of a paperback book only exists in one place at a time, easy and inexpensive copies of a digital object without loss of fidelity are possible. Thus, easy copying and repeated sale of the same digital object is possible, potentially eliminating scarcity of the digital object. Because of this, many owners implement digital rights management to prevent such impermissible transfers. Furthermore, the digital object as originally transferred to the initial purchaser may have license restrictions or other limitations on permissible use or further transfer. For example, a license to use a free download of a popular song may expire after a few days. A secondary market which allows users to effectively and permissibly transfer "used" digital objects to others while maintaining scarcity is therefore desired. A "used" digital object is one to which a user has legitimately obtained access or ownership rights (hereinafter "access rights"), and to which the user may permissibly transfer to another user. Obviously, the technology would cover a transfer of rights from one owner to the next, but how would one value and implement these transfers? Would there be a fixed cut or fee to the facilitator? Does the rights-holder get a cut? And how could one assign a monetary worth to a "new" license versus a "used" one? (After all, the bits are the same, aren't they? "There are five new copies of this product and three used ones" just sounds wrong when it comes to digital goods.) You might imagine this transfer only being allowed for DRMed content that's centrally controlled, such as Amazon and Apple's current e-book systems. I don't see content providers going crazy for this unless they benefit directly. They are not generally, let us say, "relaxed parties" in these matters. Because honestly, who wouldn't like to sell back or trade music, games and movies you no longer listen to, play with or watch? Which makes me wonder. How much are all my free iTunes singles of the week worth in resale? Yeah, that's what I thought too.
The Daily Roundup for 02.12.2013
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Getting your iOS screen clean on: wipin' secrets
In this world, there are those who don't let a little grease and grime bother them. And then there are those of us who buy bulk cleaning products at Costco and carefully tend to our oleophobic screens, caressing and conditioning our babies. Guess which group TUAW blogger Kelly H. belongs to? That's her iPad mini shown at the top of this post. Chris R. uses his Smart Cover's built-in microfiber for iPad cleaning but not for his iPhone. "The iPhone gets wiped on jeans, shirt, whatever." Kelly G. augments that approach with "Spit, breath, whatever." Randy N. relies on both the Smart Cover and his jeans. "I rub my phone on my leg," he admits. The rest of us at TUAW depend on a variety of approaches for keeping our preciousssss clean. The most popular solution is the microfiber cloth, useful for phones, tablets and camera equipment. It was endorsed by the whole team. Mike W. mentioned he picks his cloths up for cheap from Amazon. Hunt around for deals. Steve S. swears by Antec Advance spray. As the marketing text states, it's a "unique non-drip formula that adheres to your device's screen, allowing for quick and easy cleaning, and is anti-bacterial to keep your device germ-free." I use Wipe N Clear, which I in buy bulk from Costco. The individual packets make for easy transport; they work on my glasses as well as my iPad; and I can tuck a few away in my backpack. They're not perfect -- often leaving a few stray fibers -- but you can't beat them for convenience. How do you maintain your phones and tablets? Drop a note in the comments and share your cleaning secrets.
The Weekly Roundup for 02.04.2013
You might say the week is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workweek, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Weekly Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 7 days -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Weekend Poll: What's up for Apple this Spring?
Normally as February and March roll around, our minds start drifting towards iPads and OS X. Until this past year, when Apple seemed to reset its iPad clock in October, we saw new hardware ticking by each Spring. Late Winter is also usually the time we hear the first meows of Apple's newest OS X cat. So what about this year? With iPad shifting to pre-Christmas updates, will we see a refresh? And with Federighi spearheading a joint iOS/OS X restructuring, have we seen the last of the felines? Is it time for OS Xi? Will this be the year that Apple moves past traditional OS X and AppKit and introduces a grand unified operating system along the lines introduced by Steve Jobs in October 2011? You tell us. Join in these polls and then share your thoughts in the comments. %Poll-80761% %Poll-80768%
The Daily Roundup for 02.08.2013
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
The Daily Roundup for 02.07.2013
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
The Daily Roundup for 02.06.2013
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
The Daily Roundup for 02.05.2013
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
