That is one epically bad choice of names. I over-heard one female colleague suggest that it may be the first pad that most males won’t feel ashamed to purchase. I’m not sure that I’m convinced…

Apple is making a bold statement about the viability of micro-niches with the iPad. Wedging open the position between the iPhone and the MacBook, Apple seems to want to take on the NetBook and Kindle markets in one fell swoop. One elegant and well-thought-out swoop.

The iPad hits most of the major sweet spots for such a device. It has the horse-power, the graphics capabilities, the form-factor, the user-interface, the extant 150K+ apps ready to go, the iBook Store, the provocative price-points, and Apple’s legendarily elegant industrial design and marketing prowess.

One would have to be a fool to bet against the iPad’s game-changing success.

Only one thing has irked my ire in regard to the iPad:

1. 3-month wait

Oh, well, maybe also the name. Steve, call me next time you need to brainstorm product names, ok?

On some level, it makes perfect sense. In our multi-tasking, multi-communication world, the pace continues to quicken. Why wade through several multi-paragraphed blog posts each day when you can get the gist of the matter with a brief 140-character-or-less tweet? And better yet, you don’t even have to be at your computer to get them.

The new blogging is micro-blogging, Twitter style.

I’ve had many family and friends ask me about how to use Twitter. So, putting the interesting social and anthropological discussions aside for now, I will share the tools that I currently use to broadcast and receive the millions of tweets in the Twittersphere.

Twitterific
If you want a great, lightweight app that helps conserve screen real estate, you may like Twitterific. The interface is simple, easy to use, and lets you both read and publish tweets.

Twitterific Interface

Twitterific also has an iPhone/iTouch app that gives you essentially the same interface. Twitterific has both free and paid versions for the Mac and iPhone/iTouch apps ($14.95 and $9.99 respectively).

TweetDeck
Twitterific is great for simply reading and publishing tweets, but it doesn’t do much in the way of filtering or organizing your Twitter world. For that, I use TweetDeck, which runs on Mac, Windows and Linux platforms.

TweetDeck’s strength is in it’s ability to filter, organize, read and publish tweets and manage FaceBook contacts all in one application. And, it’s free!

TweeDeck interface

Twittelator
Right now, my favorite iPhone/iTouch Twitter app is Twittelator. It cost $3.99 at the iTunes App Store.

This app packs a lot of features into a simple, easy-to-use app.

Twittelator interface

Twittelator landscape

Twittelator lets you easily send pictures, show your current geo-location, add 100s of dingbats to your message, and much more. The landscape option for publishing new tweets is especially nice.

Twitter Related Sites
There are a number of very interesting sites related to the world of Twitter.

TwitterFall
One of my favorites is called TwitterFall. TwitterFall lets you filter the tweets of the world according to your predefined keywords. In the left bar, you can define keywords that show up in tweets around the world. Then, TwitterFall begins streaming those tweets as they come in (they fall, one on top of the next; hence TwitterFall). Some of the more popular keywords come fast and furious, so TwitterFall allows you to control the rate at which they fall onto the main page.

In this example, I’ve set the keyword to “Mac” and the speed to a .5 second interval between each tweet:

TwitterFall main page

TwitterFall is a great tool for getting a window into the kinds of activity occurring in the larger twittershpere.

Twitterholic
If you want to get a quick tally of the top 100 Twitter user based on number of followers, go to Twitterholic. You can even enter your own twitter account and see where you rank in the grand scheme.

TweetStats
If you’re interested in knowing how much and when you use Twitter, go to TweetStats and check your numbers.

These are a few of the Twitter related apps and sites that I use on a regular basis. But the Twitter world is evolving quickly, and there are likely to be new and innovative ways to extend Twitter and other twitter-like apps.

One relatively new and related idea is 12SecondsTV. It’s like Twitter, only with video. Check it out.

]]> http://www.macsage.com/dont-be-a-twit-tweet-well-with-these-tools/feed/ 1 http://www.macsage.com/macworld-2009-a-somber-crowd/ http://www.macsage.com/macworld-2009-a-somber-crowd/#comments Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:57:10 +0000 patrick http://www.mac-sage.com/?p=235 I expected a change in mood for this year’s MacWorld, and that is what I found.

First came the news that this would be a Steve-less MacWorld. Then, Apple announced that this would be their last year at the event. This double sucker punch to Mac fans couldn’t help but change the normally happy and excited event to a somber and dour chore.

Well, ok, it wasn’t quite that bad, but the crowds were way down this year. The MacWorld Expo folks tried to minimize the poor turnout by cleverly pushing in the dividing curtains on either side of both halls to make it seem fuller. Many vendors were saying that booth sales were sharply down.

I’m hoping that these changes are merely signs of an Apple evolution. Perhaps now, with so many Apple Stores around the country, Apple no longer needs the exposure and display area that MacWorld once provided. Maybe Apple no longer needs the MacWorld events to showcase new product announcements. And just maybe, Apple will be announcing their new products more frquently.

I’m still waiting for the new, more powerful Mac Mini, a new AppleTV, and the Kindle-killing large iPod-like device for reading electronic books.

As for MacWorld 2010, if enough vendors sign on to showcase their cool products, I’ll be there.

Two interesting details of this survey are:

1. 21% of the firms surveyed reported having delpoyed more than 50 Macs (some ranged into the thousands)
2. 28% of the firms reported running Windows in a virtual machine on the Macs

Clearly, virtualization software has helped catalyze this trend towards Mac delpoyment. The two leaders in virtualization software are VMware Inc. (their product is Fusion) and Parallels.

In business and in education, there is an increasing trend towards making the Mac the platform of choice. The one unfortunate side-effect from this trend may be the increased (although minimal) exposure of the Mac OS to hackers’ efforts.