- Saturday, May 9th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Last night, thanks to @RCNunya I discovered a new Twitter client for the BlackBerry Storm. I believe it works on other BlackBerries as well, but he has a Storm too. It’s called ÜberTwitter, and previous to using this, I was stuck with TwitterBerry, which more or less sucked. A lot.
The program is very simple to use, and has a nice clean interface. I imagine that the goal was to make it look like the Twitter home page, which they did a very good job of with the home screen.
As you can see, replies are nicely highlighted in yellow, but one of my most favorite features, is that tweets with links to TwitPic automatically show a thumbnail of the image in the timeline, and if you click on that tweet, you can see the image.
As you can also see here, all the info you need to know about the person is displayed right on the screen when you’re viewing the tweet. You can see nearly all of the information that you would get from viewing their profile on your computer right from your phone. You can also view their followers, and who they’re following right from this screen by pressing the BlackBerry button and selecting it from the menu.
Along with these featuers, ÜberTwitter also gathers location information either from a built-in GPS radio, or a more approximate location by triangulation via the cellular towers that you’re connected to (see it here). As an option, you can also use this location data to update your location setting in your Twitter profile each time you tweet, which is useful for the “near: ___” searches from the Twitter search engine. ÜberTwitter also has a host of other neat screens allowing you to see your Direct Messages and favorited tweets, trending topics, and tweets near you all from your device.
Unlike TwitterBerry, ÜberTwitter also integrates to the BlackBerry OS by adding “follow” and “view timeline” to the menus when you click on a username from text messages or other screens. Additionally, you can configure your device to play an audible alert and/or blink the LED when new tweets are received, and configure a separate setting for replies directed at you. The icon for ÜberTwitter changes slightly, making the umlauts red, and showing the number of new items in parenthesis under the icon.
The official website claims that they plan to make ÜberTwitter available for other handsets as well, but they currently only support BlackBerry OS 4.2.1, 4.3, 4.5, 4.6, and 4.7.
ÜberTwitter
Filed under: review, software, twitter — Tags: blackberry, review, software, twitter —
- Saturday, February 21st, 2009 at 6:56 pm
I decided to finally upgrade my Wordpress install to the lastest version, 2.7.1, today. I was still running 2.6.3 because I got annoyed that even when the dashboard said “Your install is outdated, please upgrade now!”; when I installed Wordpress with Fantastico, it told me to only do updates via Fantastico. Not sure how necessary that is, but that’s how I’ve always done it. Problem is, new versions are released, but Fantastico isn’t updated right away. But I decided to check it today and saw that it finally had 2.7 in there. However, once I updated, there was still a nag message saying I had 2.7.0, and the newest was 2.7.1. So I used the automatic upgrade option which is now built in.
It will take me some time to get used to this new layout and the new look and feel of the dashboard, but it seems more organized and more powerful. And as far as I can tell all of my plugins still work.
So far so good!
Filed under: site — Tags: site, software, wordpress —
- Saturday, September 20th, 2008 at 12:42 am
You may have heard, but chances are you didn’t try it out. Google released it’s own web browser a few days ago called Chrome. I decided to install it today, and was quickly frustrated and gave up. Did I give it a real chance? Not really. But it was not a pleasant experience. While several of the features are very cool and innovative, others are severely lacking and annoying.
Wins:
- Each tab runs as it’s own process. This is useful if a page causes something to crash, the whole browser doesn’t eat it too.
- Tabs are listed ABOVE the URL bar. This is useful because it keeps things more organized, and easier to read, in my opinion.
- When you start a new tab, it shows your recently viewed pages, complete with thumbnails. While this isn’t all that spectacular, it’s pretty neat.
- Incognito mode. This is kinda cool, as it lets you keep all systems normal and run one window that doesn’t save any information about your session.
However, there were a lot of things that I didn’t like.
Opps:
- In most applications (including Firefox and IE) when you click the center wheel button on your mouse, a small circle appears with up and down arrows inside. When you move ABOVE the circle icon, the page scrolls up. When you go BELOW it, it goes down. Simple, right? Well this was not available at all.
- The customization options are very minimal.
- Java does not work. I had to install two different versions of the Java Runtime in order to get a game to play, and it still didn’t work right. The applet ended up not responding, and I had to quit. Annoying.
- No plugins. Anyone who’s used Firefox will agree that it needs plugins. Like AdBlock.
Basically, it’s a nice idea, but it’s not for everyone. I will stick with Firefox for now because it does what I want it do, even if it does take up enough memory for three people’s browser session. I won’t say don’t use it, but I will say don’t get your hopes up.
Filed under: review, software — Tags: chrome, google, review, software —