TweetGenius, Twitter client for BlackBerry

This particular Twitter client has created a lot of buzz when it was first released, but then withheld for various reasons, which made the app all the more desirable ! BGR/Beejive, the developers of the TweetGenius have officially released the app to the general public. A license is $7.99, which is a steep price to pay, but no regrets ! The UI is amongst the most slickest of all the available Twitter clients for the BlackBerry platform.

To begin with, its compatible with all BlackBerries running 4.2 OS or above, with the exception of the Pearl and the Pearl Flip.

A roundup of the features it has to offer, which I'm sure will improve over time (The price you pay will give you free updates till the app hits 2.0)

• Send tweets
• Automatically fetch new tweets in the background
• Save tweets as favorites
• Delete tweets
• Send your GPS location
• Send photos to numerous online photo services
• Shorten URLs with bit.ly
• View trends in real time
• Search
• Mark messages as read when you’re done reading them
• Customize themes and fonts
• View photos
• View user profiles and timelines
• View users by both username and real name

There are a few bugs here and there, but acceptable right now, that the app has just been released. I'm sure the devs will look into them and fix them over the coming updates.

 

Images are courtesy of BoyGeniusReport, neither do I own them nor have I any licensing on them

Software Updates For The Day

Google Chrome was officially announced today for the Mac, though its available only through the Dev channel. The build number is 4.0.223.11

Windows users might be familiar with the interface, which has been there for quite some time now. Themes are available for installation, straight from the start-up page, some extensions seem to be supported in this build.

Mozilla Raindrop

Here's an extract from the Mozilla Labs blog:

• 22. Oct 2009
• The Raindrop Team

Today we’re introducing Raindrop, an exploration in messaging innovation being led by the team responsible for Thunderbird, to explore new ways to use Open Web technologies to create useful, compelling messaging experiences.

We hope to lead and spur the development of extensible applications that help users easily and enjoyably manage their conversations, notifications, and messages across a variety of online services. A central principle behind Raindrop is that messaging should be personal — we want Raindrop to be people-centric both in how we process messages, and in how we can help give people control over their personal data and experiences.

When a friend’s link from YouTube or flickr arrives, your messaging client should be able to show the video or photos near or as part of the message, rather than rudely kicking you over to a separate browser tab. Notifications from computers and mailing lists should be organized for you, not clutter your Inbox or require tedious manual filter setup. It should be easy to smoothly integrate new web services into your conversation viewer entirely using open web technologies.

Raindrop 0.1: A Prototype

To this end, we’ve started Raindrop, which we hope will become both a customizable product and a platform for a variety of innovative messaging applications on the Web.  We’ve also drafted a set of principles that we believe will help ensure that it is as useful, usable, and compelling as possible. Today, we’re releasing version 0.1, which is very much an iterating prototype, not yet ready for everyday use. Join us and help drive it there!

Design

What does a conversation on today’s web look like? Email used to house the bulk of the conversations that took place on the internet, but that’s no longer the case today. In today’s world people use a combination of Twitter, IM, Skype, Facebook, Google Docs, Email, etc. to communicate. For many of us this means that we have to keep an eye on an ever-growing number of places we might get new messages. As a result, we never know that we’ve actually processed all the important messages, because our email has overwhelmed by noise which obscures the real messages from real people.

Raindrop is an effort that starts by trying to understand today’s web of conversations, and aims to design an interface that helps people get a handle on their digital world. At the same time, it creates a programming interface (API) that helps designers and developers extend our work and create new systems on top of that data. We aren’t trying to invent new protocols or build new messaging systems, rather focusing on building a product that lets users get a handle on the systems we already use.

The Raindrop team has already gone through 2 initial iterations which demonstrate the power of the platform we already have and the possibilities that lay ahead.

The following video discusses some of the fundamental ideas in today’s Raindrop.

Mozilla Raindrop is basically a straight forward all-in-one social manager, coming by from the team which created Mozilla's email client, Thunderbird. Its gonna be supporting Twitter out of the box, and as you can predict, will support extensions, being a Mozilla product ! Its gonna be the centre of attraction as and when it comes out in all its glory !

Here's a preview video, in which the team will discuss some ideas about the project:

X-Ray Folders on OS X

This is a feature I came across very recently, on Lifehacker ! You can actually make folders display content on Quick Look in 'X-Ray' fashion ! Here's get those X-Ray folders:

1. Open Terminal
2. Copy and paste this command into the Terminal window
defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableXRayFolders 1

3. Log out and log in or type one more command if you don't feel like logging out:  
killall Finder

4. See the magic happen, when you Quick Look a folder with documents or pictures

After you do all that successfully, here's what Quick Look will look like:

To revert back to the default Quick Look view, copy and paste this into a Terminal window

defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableXRayFolders 0

Apple Updates All !

The highlight of this update, the mouse ! Mighty no longer, the mouse is now Magic ! Yes, you read it right, the Magic Mouse ! Its the world's first mouse with multi touch capabilities, and touted to be the best mouse ever made by Apple in years ! Well, take a look at the Magic already :D You obviously can't tell one side from the other :S

There has been a multitude of updates on the Apple website, here's a summary to make it easy for you guys !

Magic Mouse
Mouse with multi touch abilities !

• Connects over Bluetooth
• Compatible only with the iMacs it ships with, for now
• Gets its own Preference Pane

This one can be yours for $69, pricey for a mouse, but that's what Apple thinks you need to pay to do some 'Magic' !

Polycarbonate 13" MacBook
Now unibody, just like its aluminum cousins 

• LED Backlit Display
• Unibody enclosure, non user-serviceable battery
• Upto 7 hours of battery life
• 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor
• DDR3 RAM (Upto 4GB)
• Unified audio in/out jack
  

Still priced at $999, this one's a steal dea, but there's a small catch, the Apple Remote doesn't work with this baby now !

Mac Mini
Now, there's an option for making it a server, with an additional hard disk

• Choice between a 2.26/2.53/2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor
• NVIDIA GeForce 9400M with 256MB shared memory
• DDR3 RAM (Upto 4GB)

Starting at $599, this is the cheapest legit Mac you can buy, too bad Apple says BYODKM

 

iMac
New options of either a 21.5" or a 27" iMac
The only Mac that ships with the Magic Mouse out-of-the-box

• 21.5" & 27" Models: 3.06/3.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor
• 27" Model: 2.66 GHz Core i5 or 2.8 GHz Core i7 Processor
• DDR3 RAM (Upto 16GB)
  
• 16:9 Full HD LED Backlit screen
• Choice of NVIDIA or ATI graphics

Starts at $1199, goes all the way upto a whopping $4000 for a fully pimped out version of the 27" iMac ! Outrageous right ? That's Apple for you guys :)

Images courtesy: Apple website

Make Good Use of Your Spaces

Space: a continuous area or expanse that is free, available, or unoccupied

I'd say Spaces is probably THE most underrated and underused feature of OS X ! Some of you don't even know about it :( Some of the mainstream Macs come with screens, that have comparatively low resolutions, viz. 1280x800 px of screen estate is all you get on a 13" MacBook !

With "so much" screen space, you can probably have a Firefox window occupying all of the screen. If for some random reason, you wanna have one or two more windows/apps open, and be able to switch between them seamlessly, Spaces is the way to go !

You can have a maximum of 16 virtual desktops, all running at the same time, but each one different from the other. Now, that's Spaces for you !

If you're using Spaces for the first time now, you'd have to enable it from System Preferences.

• Open System Preferences
• Click on the Expose & Spaces icon
  
• Click on the Spaces tab
• Click "Enable Spaces"

You can choose to customize the shortcut key for activating Spaces. Press that key and see the magic happen!

Psst, try hitting the Expose shortcut when you're using Spaces

SSH Into Your iPhone/iPod touch

SFTP/SSH as its called, is a set of protocols that lets you access the contents of you iPhone/iPod touch, provided its jailbroken and you've set up SSH on it. Today, I'm gonna teach you guys just that !

What you need:
iPhone/iPod touch
Mac/PC
Cyberduck
WiFi Connection

What you can do:
Make use of custom themes
Set custom Ringtones
Brick your iPhone/iPod touch

Note that your iPhone/iPod touch needs to be jailbroken and they need to be on the same network as your Mac/PC

Now, here's what you'll need to do to enable SSH on your device, if you haven't:

1. Install OpenSSH & Toggle SSH from the Cydia package manager
2. Open Toggle SSH app and press "Enable" to enable SSH
3. Restart your device

Optional: If you have SBSettings installed, you could simplify your job of turning SSH on/off

That's almost it, now head over to your Mac and open Cyberduck
Click on "Open Connection" and a dialogue box like the one below should pop up. Make sure you use similar settings and fill in the details properly.

The IP Address of your device can be looked up in WiFi, by clicking the right pointing arrow of your WiFi network

After you do that successfully, you should come across a screen like this one:

To use custom themes, you need to have WinterBoard installed on your device.
You should be able to get some really kickass themes from the MacThemes Forum

To install them, you need to place the .theme folder under /Library/themes (Alias)
To use custom ringtones, you need to place the files under /Library/ringtones (Alias)

DO NOT fiddle with any directories, other than those I mentioned
I WILL NOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY LOSS to your data/device if you goof up with something

I mentioned something called bricking of your device. If you do something terribly wrong, such as deleting the lib/dev/bin directories, even by mistake, don't get your panties in a bunch yet :P

You'll just need to reset your device OS, by putting it into DFU Mode, and restoring with the firmware of your choice

DFU Mode:
1. Connect your device to your Mac/PC
2. Hold Home and Power buttons at the same time for exactly 10 seconds
3. Let go of the Power button after 10 seconds and continue to hold the Home button until iTunes pops up and detects your device in Recovery Mode

I'm gonna say it again for my own safety, I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING AT ALL, if you goof up

How To: Stream Stuff From Your Mac to a DLNA Device

So that you don't have to keep running around between your Mac and PS3, copying stuff that you wanna watch/listen to ! Just set up a Media Server on you Mac, sit back, and stream all you want ! Here's what you'll need to increase the productivity of this simply awesome device called the Playstation 3 !

What you'll need:
Mac/PC
DLNA Device
WiFi Router
PS3 Media Server

In my case, the DLNA device is a PS3, so I'm gonna be using this freeware called PS3 Media Server to stream Video/Music/Pictures from my Mac to the PS3, of course :)

What you can do:
Stream Movies/TV Shows/Music/iTunes Library/Photos from your Mac to your PS3 within the reach of your WiFi network

Okay, assuming that your Mac/PC and the PS3, are connected to one common network, let's proceed further !

Here's what the application would look like when you run it for the first time, provided the PS3 has been turned on and Media Server detection is enabled:

To enable detection of Media Servers on your PS3, you need to do this: Settings >> Network Settings >>Media Server Connection > Enabled

The application is capable of transcoding unknown video/audio formats into PS3 friendly formats, on-the-fly. You don't have to worry about your Blu Ray rips (MKVs) or FLACs not playing on your PS3 anymore ;)

Alright, if you've managed to get everything right, you should see something like this on the XMB, though the name "HackPro.local" would be replaced by the name that you've given to your Mac/PC:


PS3 Media Server is the only software I've come across that successfully transcodes video at a sustainable speed ! I could easily stream a 720p MKV with absolutely no lags/quality issues at all. I could also stream my whole iTunes library, YES, all of it, including Podcasts and Playlists ! DRM content wouldn't wanna stream, for sure :P

This guide applies for PCs and also for other DLNA certified devices such as Blu Ray players/NAS devices ! Lemme know if you're successful with devices other than the PS3, cos I haven't really tried on anything else at all...