Stupid rant on Tweetie 2.0 for iPhone being a $3 paid upgrade.

Most excellent rebuttal.

From atebits comes this most welcome news:

Tweetie 1 set a new standard for Twitter clients and iPhone apps in general. It proved that you didn’t have to sacrifice intuitiveness for functionality. Today we have iPhone OS 3.0, 3GS, and new Twitter APIs. Tweetie 2 is built from the ground up to take advantage of these fantastic new technologies.

Tweetie is my Twitter app of choice on both the iPhone and the Mac. I’m anxiously awaiting these updates.

I talked about Patrick Jordan of Just Another iPhone Blog and his dislike of NetNewsWire’s new interface in my review. This morning they posted a second look at the app, which offers a few nice items. The best one:

Another small thing I’ve found I quite like is that within individual feeds, there are clear section dividers showing which day and date item were published. I find this very helpful.

Newsgator has released NetNewsWire 2.0 for the iPhone, which now syncs with Google Reader, just like its desktop coounterpart. It also sports a new icon, itself an improvement over the 1.0 version.

In truth, I was not a fan of the first incarnation of NNW for the iPhone. It was slow to sync, which made it virtually unusable for me. Until now, I’v been using Google Reader’s iPhone interface, which is quite nice.

But no longer. NNW 2.0 for iPhone is just about perfect for what I need. It syncs and loads quickly. You can email an article or post it to Instapaper, as one would expect. However, with emailing, you never leave NNW, which means no delay in returning to your feeds once the email is sent. (Ditto for Instapaper.)

You can also post to Twitter without ever leaving NNW, which is a tremendous feature for those of us who like to share articles we’re reading with the Twitterverse.

The final nicety in NNW 2.0 for iPhone is the ability to choose which feeds are shown directly from the reader interface. This could be done in NNW 1.0 for iPhone, but you had to log into your Newsgator account and choose which feeds you wanted and didn’t want to sync. That was, at best, inconvenient, even more so if you were constantly adding and deleting feeds.

Now if you want to limit which feeds sync with your iPhone, then it is as easy as pressing a checkmark next to the feed name under the Show/Hide Feeds tab at the bottom of your feeds list. (Certainly some will argue that this would be better placed in a preference pane somewhere, but I like the choice of putting it where it is. It means one less button on a tool bar or saving users from having to go into the iPhone’s main Settings.)

The only complaint I have is a user preference with the UI. You can star any article by pressing the star icon on the bottom bar. However, at first I couldn’t tell that it was working because I was at the bottom of the article and the only visual cue to know that an article has been starred is that a star appears next to the headline at the top of the article.

I would much prefer the functionality of Tweetie when marking a tweet as a favorite. In Tweetie, the star icon is just an outline. When you press it to mark a tweet as a favorite, the star fills in. If you press it again to remove it as a favorite, the star returns to an outline. Under this scenario, regardless of where you are in the article you are reading, you will know if it has been starred.

In addition, a couple of other things could be added to make it more appealing to some users:

• An All Items view
• Clipped items from NNW (In fairness, there is no way yet to sync Clippings from NNW on your desktop to Google Reader)
• Shared items view

I’ve not read a lot about NNW 2.0, which appeared in the app store just yesterday. LifeHacker loves it, but Just Another iPhone Blog is unhappy with the new look and feel. For my taste, I love the clean, simple look it offers.

NNW 2.0 lives on my home screen, and it is now the iPhone RSS reader I’ve always hoped to have.

You can get a free version (iTunes link) that displays ads from The Deck. Or you can shell out $1.99 and get the premium version (iTunes link) sans ads. I’m usually a free app kind of guy, but I paid the $1.99 because this version finally delivers what I want.

Simply Apple – a gallery on Flickr.

H/T: Minimal Mac

Well crap.

I love Mint. I hate Intuit.

h/t: @yeraze

I love my AppleTV, so I’m rooting for Apple to upgrade the device with new options, such as access to Netflix and Hulu. Of course, these things are doubtful. That doesn’t mean they can’t offer some worthwhile upgrades.

Until then, I just hope they don’t discontinue it. So today’s news of price drops for 160GB models and elimination of the 40GB models has people reading the tea leaves:

A $100 price drop is pretty significant for a device that originally cost $329 and the move is no doubt geared at trying aggressively to move some units during the upcoming holiday season. A price cut at this point also makes it pretty likely that there will be no hardware changes to the device in 2009. It is Apple, however, so you can never be too sure.

For me, I hope it’s a sign that what they have planned requires larger memory and that they are trying to make them ore affordable to make them more appealing.

Otherwise, the tea leaves say they are moving all remaining stock, will do nothing new with them and eventually we will see them die.

Come on Apple, do something good with this media device. Those of us who love them really love them. Others can and will with a few adjustments.

David Pogue published a short interview with Steve Jobs on his blog.

The leading question: Why no video camera on the iPod touch:

Originally, we weren’t exactly sure how to market the Touch. Was it an iPhone without the phone? Was it a pocket computer? What happened was, what customers told us was, they started to see it as a game machine. Because a lot of the games were free on the store. Customers started to tell us, “You don’t know what you’ve got here — it’s a great game machine, with the multitouch screen, the accelerometer, and so on.”

Jobs takes a stab at Amazon, but I didn’t think it was that pointed. If anything, it was just bluntly truthful without being disrespectful.

Jobs also talked about trying to gain 30 pounds by eating lots of ice cream.

There is an annoying bug in Snow Leopard that seems to have no fix. Without reason or apparent cause, the Alert Volume changes itself to 0, effectively muting all system alerts.

Several people have reported this bug in the Apple forums. Some relate it to Things. Some say it has to do with certain IMAP accounts in Mail. I have both scenarios present, but after testing neither is the culprit.

I hope the 10.6.1 update will fix this.

TUAW writer Dave Caolo shares how he set up a “Writing Mac”:

I’ve also had a G5 iMac for a while, but nothing for it to do. Earlier this week, I gave it a fresh install of Mac OS 10.4 and thought I’d use it for blogging and other writing. No web browsing, Twitter, iPhoto or the like. Call it a “Writing Mac.” Here’s how I set it up.

There’s a few good ideas in there, but I don’t understand why this can’t be done on your main machine by turning off all distractions.