Chewy Apps

I was excited when I read that Tweetbot would be integrating Tweet Marker support. Tweet Marker is a service that keeps you in sync between different Twitter clients, so you don’t miss any tweets in your timeline. I didn’t have a Twitter client for the Mac. Up until now I’ve never bothered, precisely because which tweets I’ve read couldn’t be kept in sync. But now they could, so I needed to find a client for the Mac.

I found that Twitterrific was the only Mac client that supported Tweet Marker, which was fine. Especially because it was on sale for just five bucks. So I bought and installed it on my Mac.

I can now report that Tweet Marker doesn’t work very well. The Twitterrific folks replied to my complaining tweets about this by saying that it works for them. Great for them. But no help to me. They pointed out that I have to exit the apps for optimal performance, but that didn’t seem to help much. (It did help a little.) Sometimes it worked going from Twitterrific to Tweetbot. But not if Tweetbot had to load so many tweets that it had to skip some – even if the marker was on a tweet that was not skipped. Going from Tweetbot to Twitterrific was even worse. It just wasn’t reliable.

So now I’m back to a one-client Twitter universe. Back to Tweetbot. I hope the Tweet Marker, Tweetbot, and Twitterrific folks can get this stuff working, because I’d really love to use it.

[Update: Now that I've read this post, I almost want to give Tweet Marker another chance. I'll tell you what happens if I do.]

A week and a half ago I went to my first Mobile Monday Ottawa event.

I’m not the most social of people, I’m not a type A, and I am definitely an introvert. But recently I decided to branch out a bit and go to some social events here in Ottawa. It started at Startup Drinks Ottawa (@OTTStartupoDrink on Twitter), where I met a few people. I didn’t really move from table to table (we only made one such move when the table we were at was getting too crowded), but luckily lots of people wanted to drop by our table. I met some new people and added them to my Twitter stream.

Next up was CocoaHeads Ottawa. They had two very interesting presentations, but there wasn’t a lot of socializing. Maybe that happened at the bar afterwards, but from what I saw, not a lot of people went to that (I didn’t).

Last was Mobile Monday, and it was a great event. One of the organizers was Macadamian, an old employer of mine. I couldn’t believe they’re up to about 170 people now! When I was there, the company was about 25 people in size.

There were several headhunters at the Mobile Monday event, looking for mobile developers. That made me feel good because, you know, I’m a mobile developer.

Much to my chagrin I had to miss the last Startup Drinks Ottawa, but I’ll definitely try to make the next one. There are a lot of interesting people to talk to, even if I’m doing a lot more listening than talking.

I grew up in Waterloo and have a relative who works for RIM in Waterloo. I moved to Ottawa, and have two friends that work for RIM in Ottawa. I was once headhunted by a RIM headhunter, and had their timing been better, I could be working at RIM today. If that had happened, I might have been out of a job soon.

RIM recently announced the cutting of 2000 jobs. This is weird on the one hand because RIM is still profitable, and wouldn’t they want those people to help them regain their leadership position? It’s understandable on the other hand because RIM isn’t doing so well anymore, and they want to prevent actual losses in the upcoming quarters.

As a Canadian, I’m sad that this has happened to RIM. I want our darling high tech company to succeed and to give those yanks a walloping! As a cell phone user, I much prefer the iPhone and just wish the BlackBerry would go away already so that the company I work for doesn’t have to worry about it. On a personal level, I’m really hoping that those I know with RIM jobs don’t lose theirs before they find something new. And I hope they’re wise enough to be looking.

Matt Richman wrote a great aricle discussing Apple’s huge hoard of cash. Here’s a small excerpt:

And therein lies the secret to Apple’s incredible success in the stock market. The reason AAPL has done so well over the last 10 years is precisely because Apple hasn’t focused on its share price — and instead focused on making “beautifully designed products that are user centric and work how they are supposed to work.” As Fortune magazine put it: “Most companies view the P&L [Profit and Loss statement] as the ultimate proof of a manager’s accountability; Apple turns that dictum on its head by labeling P&L a distraction only the finance chief needs to consider.”

Check out the full article here:

Apple has now beat Nokia as the world’s leading vendor of smartphones. Nokia’s smartphone shipments declined to 16.7 million units in the last quarter. During the same period, Apple shipped 20.3 million iPhones, a dramatic improvement.

Apple is now sitting on the smartphone throne with the likes of RIM, HTC, Samsung, and now Nokia at its feet. The Android platform as a whole, though, still outships Apple in smartphone numbers. But that has been leveling out of late. Are we reaching a stable state? Only time will tell.

I write iPhone apps for a living. I have a regular job with regular people, working for a small startup in Ottawa. One thing we discovered is that requiring a user to log in is a barrier to entry. We needed users to create accounts and log in so that they could answer surveys, and we would know if they’d answered them before. (Using accounts wasn’t required for app use, but it was required to use certain parts of our apps.) But people didn’t like creating accounts and logging in, so we transformed our system to make it so that users didn’t have to log in. We just logged them in anonymously instead.

Frankly, I wasn’t surprised. I download a fair number of apps every month. When an app wants me to log in, that’s strike one. If an app requires that I create an account and log in before I can do anything at all, that’s strike two and strike three. (Unless, of course, it’s obvious why an account is needed for the functionality of the app.)

That’s the situation I found myself in when I downloaded the ItSpot shopping app. It’s an app that helps me find shopping deals in the city I live in. Cool. It requires logging in with an account. Not cool. I deleted the app. I don’t see a correspondence between shopping deals and creating an account. It already asked for my location, which I gave it. It made sense to require a location, because this app gives me shopping deals based upon it. But then it required that I create an account or log in with Facebook, and that’s where it lost me. Sorry ItSpot dudes, I wanted to help you guys by using your app. But you just made it too annoying.