Twitter for Mac Updated→

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Speaking of being shocked, I thought this app was long dead. The last time it had received an update prior to today was June 1, 2011. That's right, OS X Snow Leopard reigned king when Twitter for Mac was last updated.

But, it appears Twitter is breathing new life into their desktop app. They added Twitter Photos support, Retina graphics, updated iconography, and a slew of languages. They've even put Ben Sandofsky in charge of it full time.

We'll see what happens, but personally, I am more excited that Iconfactory is working on Twitterrific 5 for Mac.

The next generation of Instapaper→

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Marco Arment:

I’m happy to announce that I’ve sold a majority stake in Instapaper to Betaworks. We’ve structured the deal with Instapaper’s health and longevity as the top priority, with incentives to keep it going well into the future. I will continue advising the project indefinitely, while Betaworks will take over its operations, expand its staff, and develop it further.

I'll admit I was shocked to see this, but I can see why Marco took this path. Just from reading his blog about how much time it take to work on The Magazine, I couldn't imagine how he'd find time for Instapaper as well.

Instapaper is one of those apps I have had a long relationship with, and one I hope will have a continued and wonderful future. Congrats, Marco.

End WWDC→

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Daniel Jalkut:

Call it WWDC if you like, but it needs to take place 365 days a year instead of 4. It needs to serve 300,000 developers, not 5,000. And it needs to take place online, not within the cramped confines of a small convention center in San Francisco.

WWDC tickets went on sale and subsequently sold out within 2 minutes today. Two. Minutes. Probably less. It's plain to see that the demand for WWDC has outstripped the supply, and I think Daniel has cooked up the beginnings of a pretty good solution.

⌘ Yummy Yummy Chat Heads

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I have to admit, like my friend David Chartier, I am a rare breed of nerd who actually likes Facebook. David talked a lot about Facebook Home and its potential. I want to talk about the new iOS app, Facebook 6.0.

The 6.0 update to the Facebook app streamlines the interface for the better, and beefs up its messaging capabilities. One way it does this is through Stickers, which are fun little pictures you can sling around through private or group messages. They’re cute, because they were designed by the awesome David Lanham.

But the real news here is Chat Heads, which show the avatar of the friend(s) you are currently chatting with in a little circle off to the side of wherever you are inside Facebook’s app. You can simply tap the circle and a conversation expands as a layer on top of where you are at, you send a message, tap the circle again, and it collapses the conversation and you go right back to where you were.

It’s a really enjoyable and nice experience.

On Facebook Home for Android, Chat Heads can appear anywhere on your device, even when you are in another app. Right now, this only works within Facebook on iOS, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it stayed that way.

But here is why I like the concept of Chat Heads, and where I’d like to see them go as a concept.

I like that they are not too intrusive during a conversation when you are doing something else. And I think they’d be the perfect interface for iMessage. Right now on iOS, it is kind of jarring to have an active back and forth with a friend over iMessage when you are also trying to look at or do something else. You switch fully from what you are doing to the conversation, then have to switch fully back.

Let’s say I am writing up a post like this on my iPad. I would much rather an iMessage come up off to the side as a little icon and wait for me to tend to it. I simply tap the icon, a conversation popover appears, I fire off a sentence, and tap back to what I am doing. It is a much less distracting way of giving a few seconds for a reply. Why?

Because even though it is a context switch, it is a very good illusion of a partial context switch (which doesn’t exist). It feels like you are only giving away attention peripherally, instead of having to be ripped from your focus of one app and dumped into another. Because you feel like you only give away quick aside of context, and you can see the task at hand right behind the conversation popover, it is easier to return to what you are doing.

Facebook and Apple seem to have a nice relationship, what with the deep integration with iOS and OS X last year. I hope that relationship could start a collaboration where maybe Apple can use the Chat Heads concept for iMessage and SMS, if they also allow Facebook Messages to be a global deal through it. I think I’d be okay with that, especially if there were a toggle.

Apple's Pessimism Problem→

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Marco on the pessimism that has been surrounding Apple for a couple years now:

A year later, when Apple did release a model named “iPhone 5” that was far better than the 4S and had an external redesign, the inertia of Apple pessimism was so strong and the press had become such petulant children about Apple products that they shat all over it even though it was a huge update that gave them everything they asked for, plus more.

Now, Apple pessimism is even stronger. No matter what they release and no matter how well it sells, they won’t win over the press, the pundits, the stock market, or the rhetoric. Not this year. They could release a revolutionary 60-inch 4K TV for $99 with built-in nanobots to assemble and dispense free smartwatches, and people would complain that it should cost $49 and the nanobots aren’t open enough.

Apple does indeed have a problem here. I still think they should have named what we now know as the iPhone 5 as simply "the new iPhone".

A $5 app isn't expensive→

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I’m neither an economist nor a psychologist, but it strikes me that too many iOS device owners fail to act in their own best interests—both in the immediate near term and in the long term—when they scoff at the thought of spending money in the App Store. Here’s how customers who spend lavishly on iOS hardware punish themselves by skimping on apps.

Lex Friedman makes the case for paying good money for your great apps. If you are one who balks at an app that costs more than a buck or two, you need to go read this.

Heck, read it anyway.

⌘ Three Years

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It is a little hard to imagine that in a short three years how much the iPad has changed the world. It almost feels like it has been around much longer than three years.

I remember not knowing exactly why I needed wanted an iPad, but venturing out to look at one anyway. Of course, I ended up buying one. And I remember finding that oversized iPhone to be magical.

In these past three years I have owned four — count ‘em, four — iPads. The original, the iPad 2, The New iPad (or iPad 3 in regular person speak), and the best of them all so far — the iPad mini.

I still think that not even Apple knew exactly what the iPad would become when they launched it. And the truth is, it becomes whatever app you are currently running. It can be a book, an instrument, a race car, a movie studio (or movie theater), or be the future of communication drawn into the present.

The truly great thing is the amount of creativity the iPad can unleash in a person as the barrier to interact with a computer is broken down to simply directly touching the thing you are creating.

With each iteration of the iPad, my favorite has been the concentration of it to the lighter, more portable iPad mini. And I can’t help but feel that if we have come this far in three short years, how much further will we be in three more?

iOS 7 Settings→

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Louie Mantia imagines what iOS 7 may look like from the Settings app. I love his use of Avenir, a font that I have absolutely fallen in love with. I use it in any app I can (e.g., Day One and Twitterrific 5).

Louie makes a lot of other smart decisions, and I think I would love it if iOS got a bit of a makeoverin this style.

Some related reading would be Chairman Gruber's little birdies.

techese 4.0

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If you checked out the site in the past 24 hours, you may have noticed that things seem a little different. It’s a subtle visual change, as the general design stayed fairly similar, but this is definitely a brand new techese.

Without further ado, welcome to techese 4.0. This is the first real visual refresh since November 2011.

But it is so much more than a visual refresh. There are plenty of functional updates as techese has been updated from Squarespace 5 to Squarespace 6.

Here are a few of the changes you’ll enjoy:

  • Responsive design for mobile devices (!!!)
  • Linked List items will now use Daring Fireball style title links. These are signified with an → to the right of the title. (I’m not updating the back catalog, so this is from now on).
  • Simple liking of a post is now available using the little heart below each post.
  • Images now use a lightbox if you want to see them larger.

And a couple things to note:

  • Permalinks are found below every post by clicking the date.
  • The RSS feed has changed to http://techese.net/articles?format=rss, which I have done a 301 redirect for. In my testing, things like the soon-to-perish Google Reader made the switch just fine, but you may want to update the address anyway.

That’s all I have for now. Enjoy the update.

Forecast→

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The folks that brought you Dark Sky have taken a leap ahead, offering a free web app that offers full weather forecasts for the entire planet.

If you love Dark Sky (I do) then Forecast will be right up your alley. Save it to your home screen for bonus points.

(Also, finally an awesome site I can go to for weather on my Mac).

Twitterrific 5.2 Gets Pushy

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Ever since Iconfactory released a long awaited rewrite to Twitterrific last year, they have been hard at work on bringing the classiest Twitter app out there to being extremely powerful.

Their previous update, 5.1, added Muffling, which is muting for users, hashtags, and links done with a spin that only Iconfactory could come up with. And when 5.1 was released, the release notes subtly teased the next update with an auspicious phrase:

Ollie will return in…OCTOPUSHY

Today’s 5.2 update to Twitterrific features Push Notifications. You can receive notifications for Direct Mentions, Replies, Mentions, Favorites, Retweets, and Follows. They even have fantastic little color symbols that show in the notification itself, which I have found handy to know the type of message at a glance.

Right now Iconfactory is launching Push as a beta, with only the first 1000 accounts gaining access today, though they will be rolling out availability over the next couple weeks. This is being done to ensure their servers are able to handle the load. If you weren’t able to activate push yet, try again the next day to see if you can. Once your account is enabled, it can be enabled on any other number of devices.

There are all sorts of other updates in 5.2. A couple other new features are profiles now show Twitter’s banner images (and look great!) and discussions can be shared via email or Storify.

Some of the improvements are that the timeline can now show 600 tweets at a time up from 400, improvements to username autocomplete, and the load more button now animates as loads, along with a laundry list of other improvements and fixes.

If you are looking for the friendliest Twitter client out there, you need Twitterrific. Everyone’s favorite blue bird costs just $2.99 in the App Store.