iPhone apps midi-review – Birdhouse and TweetDeck

I’m in the middle of preparing a huge post that lists all the apps I have on my new iPhone after the first month, but there’s a few I wanted to talk about with a little more detail than I’ll have room for. I’ve got sixty-eight apps on there at the moment, so they’re going to be lucky if they get two sentences each in the big review!

The first two are my Twitter apps, TweetDeck and Birdhouse.

Now, everyone loves Twitter, but isn’t two apps for it a bit over the top? Well, not really, because they’re both specialist apps that focus on different things.

Tweetdeck specialises in reading Twitter, especially for those (like me) who follow too many people.

In regular use, it looks like an ordinary Twitter client – a list of the latest tweets from all the people you follow. But if you swipe sideways, or push the columns button at the bottom, you get a different list of tweets that meet some rule you have defined.

For example, you could have a column with just the tweets from the celebrities you follow, or a column of the real people. You could have a column of all the tweets containing a particular phrase or word. (I have a column of tweets including the words “Exchange Server Down” which is really just pure schadenfreude on my part).

Essentially it lets you have a two-tier system. I still want to follow everyone that I do, but there are some groups of tweets I’m particularly interested in, and want to be able to quickly filter the list to just those. Tweetdeck lets me do that.

One particularly nice feature, by the way, is that it syncs my columns with the cloud, so I can see the same columns with Tweetdeck on my Mac as I do on my iPhone. Unfortunately the iPhone version, unlike the desktop versions, only does Twitter, and not Facebook. However, the iPhone Facebook client is pretty good, so I can wait for them to add this.

Birdhouse specialises in writing Twitter, especially for those (like me) who want to write more carefully.

While the traditional criticism of Twitter is that it’s just people writing about what they had for lunch, some people put more effort in. They write things that they hope are funny, or interesting, and to do this properly you need to be able to write drafts and edit them. Birdhouse does this. You type in a potential tweet, and it saves it. You can come back to it later, and revise it. You can rate it with marks out of five, and when you’re happy with it, you can send it out to the world.

That’s all Birdhouse does, and many people find this confusing. “A Twitter client that you can’t read Twitter with?” they cry. But, silly as it sounds to agonize over 140 characters, if you want

to improve the quality of your tweets, you need a place to keep them while you work on them.

Besides, if I really want to tell the world what I had with lunch, with photos, then Tweetdeck can handle that.

I just can't stop watching this...

I mean, it's just... I think it... oh for goodness sake, just watch the bloomin' thing, will you?

They didn't rehearse the bit near the end where they jump over each other down the staircase: they just knew what they wanted, and did it.

Why modern life is fantastic.

While I'm very proud to be a geek, there is one minor issue.

You see, I happen to be a - mostly lapsed - member of the special category known as the "Math Geek". Now, it's irritating enough that this uses outrageously American spelling, but the worst of it is that we are all supposed to like Bach. Yes, yes, he used numerical sequences in his work. Heard of rhythm? It's maths, and they all bloomin' well used it, but as part of their art.

And you know what takes the biscuit in all this? I do like Bach.

So, why modern life is fantastic: Herbert von Karjaran. Conducting Bach's Mass in B Minor. With the Vienna Philharmonic - who had to use the beautiful assumed name "Orchester der Gesellshaft der Musikfreunde in Wien" because of office politics! Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing the Soprano. It's even recorded in Abbey Road!

Surely such an exquisite recording costs a King's ransom? Or could it be just £3.16 on Amazon MP3? I paid the money before starting this post, and the music will be on my iPod before I finish it.

Fantastic.

Celebrity

I thought it might be interesting to share a list of ten "famous" people I've seen over the years, and what they were up to at the time.

I think it only fair not to include people who I saw just because they were working, so Her Majesty the Queen, Mayor Boris Johnson, Elvira, and Baron Bingham of Cornhill, KG, PC, QC, FBA are sadly missing from this list.

• Jo Brand, who was ordering a curry.
• Paul Daniels, who was trying to run me over in his car.
• Geoffrey Howe, who was eating dinner.
• Michael Jackson, who was behind me in the queue in WH Smiths. I have long since become accustomed to the fact that no-one will ever believe this, or even consider it plausible.
• Ben Kingsley, who was going to Venice on the train.
• Michael Portillo, who was trying to run me over in his official ministerial car. Actually, as a taxpayer, technically he was trying to run me over in MY car.
• Phillip Schofeld, who was trying to run me over in his car. It says much about his qualities that he alone, upon realising he had missed, took the time to reverse and try again.
• Shaun Scott, who was having a pint. He was in the Bill! Yes, I know everyone's been in the Bill, but he was an Inspector and everything.
• Antony Worrall-Thompson, who was evaluating carrots in Waitrose.
• Paula Yates, who was buying shoes.

I also saw an incredibly famous footballer once, having a jewellery store closed, but despite who he was being explained to me for at least 20 minutes I still haven't the faintest idea which one it was.

Rebuilding my Asus eeePC

My tiny blue Asus eeePc has been sadly neglected lately, but I recently decided to start making better use of it, because my 17" Macbook Pro is rather bulky to keep carrying from the kitchen table, to my office, to bed.

However, the copy of Ubuntu NBR I'd installed before was a bit out of date, and using a bit too much disk space to update itself, and having a networking issue that my Linux skills aren't up to solving, so I thought I'd switch to XP.

First, I replaced the 512Mb memory with 1Gb, so as to be sure the machine wouldn't be sluggish.

Next, I copied a Windows XP CD to my Windows 7 laptop, and ran nLite over it. This impressive software takes the XP install media and alters it in many ways. In this case, I was stripping everything I don't need out. There's only a 4Gb SSD in the eeePC, so no room to leave the Hungarian keyboard settings file around "just in case".

nLite did an impressive job - even after adding in all the Asus drivers (another cool feature of nLite), the resulting XP installer was about half the regular size. I burnt this to a CD-R, popped it into a USB CD-ROM drive, went into the eeePC BIOS and told it to install an OS, and boot from the CD) and started it going.

After a couple of false starts (which turned out to be a bad USB CD-ROM drive!!) I was able to install XP. Very plain looking (I have all the eye candy either removed or turned off) but perfectly functional, fast, and with plenty of space left on the SSD hard drive for some software. The main use of this device will be Web Browsing, and I decided to install Chrome on it. Google are eyeing up the Netbook market for Chrome OS, so the Chrome browser is heavily optimised for these devices, and indeed it runs a treat. Very fast, and the maximised and full screen settings make good use of the tiny 800x480 screen on the EEEPC.

What else? Rocketdock and Launchy put a little bit of eye candy back, mostly to make it easier to launch applications with the Start menu hidden to save space. As usual, Evernote, Spotify, and DropBox clients give me access to (and local copies of) my data from the cloud. Picassa so I can upload photos when travelling using the built-in card reader.

A new thing I'm trying is a copy of AbiWord in case I want to write some blog posts etc. while offline. My local Starbucks doesn't have WiFi, darn it. I don't need a full office suite, and I remember I liked AbiWord back in the early days of dabbling in Linux, so I thought I'd give it a go. I might put VPN software and Office communicator on so I can make work calls from it in an emergency. And I suppose a couple of games might end up on there too.

On the whole, I'm pretty pleased so far with how this rebuild has turned out. Now to stress test it and see how useful I find it.