You can even spring load applications. For instance, if you want to drag in some text in TextEdit, just hover over the icon in the Dock and press the spacebar. Once a new window opens, drop in your text.

Nothing new (but much useful) in the rest of the article, but the snippet above surprised me. Why doesn’t text dragged onto a docked TextEdit icon open a new TE window pre-populated with the text? This is an annoying oversight by the OS X team. I’m grateful for this usable alternative method.

Netbooks are simply cheap little laptops.

I’m happy that someone has said it because this surely is the point. A netbook hacked to run OS X runs real Mac software. An iTouch Tablet or whatever it is that Apple fans are positive that the company will soon release will be amazing for movies, maps, games – anything that can take advantage of a larger screen. But a great majority of iPhone software is what one might call ‘list based.’ Expand these apps across a wider screen and what was proportional and focused starts to look ridiculous. Moreover, if your mobile work involves editing or producing a significant quantity of text then a keyboardless tablet will be of no help to you.

A thin, light, aluminum MacBook Mini. I have 750$ for that.

Tweetie is currently my favorite, but it’s not perfect. Here’s a few reasons why.

Essential Omission

No AppleScript Support

This is my biggest complaint. AppleScript lets users add all the features to an app that are either too specialized for the wider audience or just workflow specific. Have a look at Scripts and Tricks for Twitterrific for a few ideas about how AppleScript could extend Tweetie.

Bugs and Annoyances

The Detached Post Box

Writing and reading are different things, and thus Tweetie’s functional separation of the two makes perfect sense, as does separate keyboard shortcuts for bringing the reading and tweeting window forward. About half the time, however – and this is surely a bug – bringing the post box forward via the keyboard also brings with it your followers’ updates. This is an annoyance I was hoping Tweetie 1.1 would fix. It didn’t.

Secondly, the keyboard shortcut should only activate one instance of the post box, even if you already have one open. If I open a post box, begin composing my tweet and then switch to Safari to grab a link, I should be able to call my active post box forward again with the keyboard. Instead, Tweetie creates a new post box which eclipses the first, partially filled in box. It’s possible to use Command + Tab to bring forward the original box, but again this brings with it your followers’ tweets. This needs to be thought out better.

The Nag Screen

Periodically on first launch, Tweetie confronts you with a nag message asking you to register the app. This is a problem for me. Either Tweetie is free, or it isn’t. I’m content to use an ad supported version of Tweetie. I’d also like to post to Twitter guilt free. A solution might be to display the nag message inline the same way as the ads are shown.

‘Go To User’

By default, Command + U should open the user profile of the selected tweeter. Instead, you’re presented with this:

The major problem is that I have my followers’ real name displayed with their tweets. The ‘Go To User’ dialogue box asks for their Twitter name. In many cases, I have no idea what that is. As is, it’s a near useless feature.

Selected Tweet Color

As a new addition to 1.1, the selected tweet no longer displays a subtle glow. Instead it’s a horrible bright blue which retains nothing of the subtlety of the previous display type and eschews consistency with the rest of the UI.

Wouldn’t it be Nice?

Google Maps and Search Nearby

Displaying a user’s profile could also show their world location on a Google Map. I have a feeling that this would look very pretty in Tweetie. From here, the ability to search nearby users would be a bonus.

A Combined Stream

I have two Twitter accounts: @PeterVk and @MacMembrane. I wouldn’t mind having the option to have a combined view.

Some Nifty Sound Effects

Why not make Tweetie sound as good as it looks? Distinct sounds for @replies, DMs and successful posts would make it so.

Advanced Search Controls

I have some ideas about how this could be implemented, and again, I’m sure it’d look very pretty given Atebits design acumen.

Final Thoughts

Tweetie has only been released for a few weeks now and I’ve no doubt that the app will continue to improve with each subsequent release. In its present form it’s the best Twitter app for Mac that I’ve tried. Try it out if you haven’t already and let me know how you think it could be better.

A new, lower-priced, smaller, and more adorable iPhone, with more or less the same technical specs as the original iPhone. Given that those specs include the 320 × 480 display, I wouldn’t expect something tiny, but remember that the original iPod Mini was “just” 35 percent smaller by volume than the then-current full-sized iPod. Shrink the iPhone’s forehead and chin and make it thinner — maybe a lot thinner — is what I’m thinking. Existing iPhone apps would run just fine on the new device, as it’d have similar, if not identical, CPU performance and RAM to previous full-sized iPhones.

Until this post I found it difficult envisioning a lite version of the iPhone, largely because I wasn’t separating form from features in my mind. An iPhone with the same form factor but lesser specs wouldn’t, in my opinion, be flying off the shelves the way that the current model is. If Apple were to differentiate the second model exteriorly the way that it does the iPod Nano, the case may be somewhat different. And much more interesting.

Most interesting in the article, however, is the subtle ontological conclusion that one can draw about the iPhone from the following passage:

Consider that none of the major new features in the iPhone OS 3.0 software is related to the telephone. MMS comes closest, but even that doesn’t pertain to phone calls. The “phone” in “iPhone” is much more about ubiquitous always-on wireless TCP/IP networking than it is about the 20th century conception of telephony.

The implication here is that the iPhone is not a phone as we might think of it in any traditional sense. Thinking back to the initial unveiling of the iPhone, it’s easy to see that Apple itself understood that it wasn’t merely releasing a new device, but that it was in fact defining an entirely new category of device. And we see this in the crowds reaction to Jobs’ three pronged description of the product.

“A widescreen iPod with touch controls.”

Applause and cheers from the audience.

“A revolutionary mobile phone.”

Explosive applause. A moment Apple fans have been long waiting for. And finally:

“A breakthrough internet communications device.”

Subdued applause. Apple’s ‘internet communications device,’ the importance of which is demonstrated by it’s third place in the presentation after the widescreen iPod and the phone, elicited more confusion from the audience than joy.

Despite its name, the iPhone is no more a phone than a television is a radio, or a radio a newspaper. Apple knew this and the iPhone 3.0 software proves that they still do.

Dropbox is becoming more popular and they have an excellent video tutorial up at their site that explains the fundamentals of the program, so I’m not going to waste words here describing how it works. Instead, I’ll talk about five things that I keep synced between my two Macs with the help of Dropbox. I hope it gives you some ideas.

My AppleScripts

As far as I’m concerned, any action that requires more than a total of two mouse clicks and will be done more than once is a good candidate for an AppleScript. Many of my scripts are no more than an few lines long. But even such a small amount of code, when run repeatedly via a keystroke over a long period, will rescue a significant portion of my life from the doldrums of repetitive drudgery. I use FastScripts to run my scripts.

My TextExpander Snippets

What AppleScript is for repetitive tasks, TextExpander is for repetitive typing. I recently wrote about how to use TextExpander to perform custom searches from Safari’s location bar and since then I’ve become completely addicted to the method. In the past I’ve used TextExpander primarily when developing new websites, but these custom URL searches have suddenly made TE more important to me than every before.

My 1Password Keychain

The web is a dangerous place I’m told. 1Password keeps you a little bit safer by allowing you to create crazy strong and unique logins for every site you visit and save them in its custom 1Password keychain. The only problem with this solution is that if you’re ever on a computer without 1Password, you’re pretty much out of luck for logging in anywhere. By keeping 1Password in sync across your Macs, you remove this obstacle. Unless, that is, you’re forced to use a PC at work, in which case you’re out of luck.

My TaskPaper To Dos

If you work on multiple Macs, having your To Dos synced across machines is a no brainer. As I’ve written, I use HogBay Software’s dead simple TaskPaper to keep track of my pending chores and sudden inspirations, and while I do very much like the uncluttered and themable UI, the main reason I love the application is the plain text format in which it stores your notes. Total portability and compatibility with any app that can read .txt. It’s pure convenience.

My MarsEdit Drafts Folder and Preferences

Though I use TextEdit for the majority of my writing needs, I turn to MarsEdit when it’s time to add some markup and images to my words before sending them up to the web. MarsEdit allows you to store local drafts of your posts and see exactly how they will look on your site even without an internet connection. Keeping all my drafts as well as my custom macros synced up between Macs really is a necessity for me.

Your Dropbox

This is of course my personal list of files and folders that I sync using Dropbox, and you likely have a very different set of apps which are critical to what you do on your computer. So in that case, are you a Dropbox user? Has it improved your life like it has mine? Doing something interesting with it? If so, let us know about it in the comments. And if not, hopefully this article has given you some ideas.

A shout out to Img2icns.

iTunes automatically selects the language and best voice for your song titles and artist names. It looks at song data, like the title, artist, and album information, then applies intelligent algorithms to choose the right language.

This feature is entirely lacking in Leopard’s built in text to speech functionality. Now that it’s made its way into iTunes, however, my bet is that it will be featured system wide in Snow Leopard.

Here is a sampling of playlists being read in a few different languages. Note the woman’s voice as well.

The poor state of Korea’s online Apple store isn’t helping matters. As a Mac user living in Korea you can imagine that I’ve visited Apple’s online store more than a few times. More often than not during these visits I find that ‘Buy Now’ links for major products (including products featured on the http://www.apple.com/kr/ landing page) are either dead or redirect to the US store. In the below video you can see an example of both. It’s frustrating, to say the least.

It’s necessary that a lone webpage in a window registers as a tab insofar as the ‘+’ add tab button would be somewhat indistinct otherwise. Nevertheless, that one is able to drag a tab out of a tabless window and…into another window doesn’t make much sense.