Recently there is has been lots of innovation in App design for tablets. Apps like Qwiki, Flipboard, Zite, Pulse, Reedr have really figured out how to give a good user experience on a tablet. However, sadly, most twitter clients have not. Even iphone twitter clients like TweetBot are better than most iPad twitter clients as they are more optimised for the display size. The fundamental problem seems to be that twitter client developers think that iPad is just a scaled up iPhone.

With the help of this thinking various successful iPhone twitter client developers have released new iPad clients which are nothing more than scaled up versions of their iPhone application, with some added iPad elements. For instance, the following screenshots are from Twitterific and Echofon on the iPad.

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As you may observe, over 90% of the screen it taken up by a single UITableView. IMO the UITableView is an efficient way to present of a list of items (or a stream of tweets) in a small display. It makes no sense however, to just adopt the same thinking on a larger screen. A better use of the iPad screen is made in TweetDeck for instance. It makes more rich use of the screen, as the following screenshot depicts. However, unfortunately, the TweetDeck app has some performance issues.

Recently a new bread of applications such as Flipboard and Zite have emerged. These applications enable you to consume information in a magazine like fashion. I believe they too are an efficient way to consume your twitter feed and lists however they are not design to be full fledged clients. I believe there is a gap in the iPad App market for twitter clients that make rich use of the screen yet do so in a computationally efficient manner.

If you are aware of any good twitter clients please post to the comments...

Today, Google has dramatically decreased prices for the extra storage you can purchase for Google Services like Gmail and Picasa. The current prices:

Apple also provides upgrade options for iDisk and MobileMe Mail, however their prices are significantly more expensive an extra 60GB from Apple will set you back for an additional £59 (~ $100), while Google for 80GB charges only $20!.

So you might think that Apple's iDisk is atleast accessible from everywhere, while Google Storage can't be accessed as a drive? Think again, this is how:

For Mac Users:

Install gDisk. gDisk provides an accessible application for mounting your gmail drive on your mac.

For Linux Users:

The most popular way for Linux users to mount Gmail storage locally is to use FUSE. If your on ubuntu, this is how to do it

sudo apt-get install gmailfs
cp /etc/gmailfs/gmailfs.conf ~/.gmailfs.conf
chmod 600 ~/.gmailfs.conf

Now specify your gmail account credentials in ~/.gmailfs.conf and to finally mount the drive, just type:

mkdir gmail
mount.gmailfs none gmail

For Windows Users:

Just like for the Mac there are applications available like gDrive Shell Extension

I've been facing this issue since the last couple of weeks.
When I open a webpage in Safari 4, the page becomes "gray-scaled" after a couple of seconds.
See the attached screenshots on what I mean.
Once I load Google News, this is the page I get.

After a few seconds, it turns into this ugly site:

Anyone faced this issue yet?

Tim Gaden has documented an excellent tip to speed up Apple Mail.

It involves optimising the SQLite database Apple Mail uses to store indexes and subject lines of emails.

You can check your current 'envelope archive' size by entering this in the terminal:

ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index

Then to optimise it (cleans out stuff that has been marked for deletion but not actually deleted, defragments the structure, etc):

sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum;

Then check your envelope archive size again to see the results…

ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index

It compacted my envelope archive down from 55MB to 50MB — not a huge increase, but the speed difference was dramatic.

In particular, my 'sent mail' folder which had been taking 10 - 15 seconds to open (8,000 items) now only takes two or three seconds.

Read the full post and many informative comments here.

Today morning I read a blog post at Techcrunch on App Store refund policy. The article stated that "users can get a refund within 90 days, according to Apple policy". I was glad to hear that as I had purchased various iPhone apps, which I frankly did not require at all.

I asked for a refund for two applications. For one I got it, and the mail clearly stated that the refund was a "one time exception" only and all sales are final. See attached Screenshot.

For the other application I got this mail:

Both Apps were bought within 90 days, so why would TechCrunch state that there is an Apple policy? Am I missing something?

I've just upgraded to iLife '09. Over the next few posts, I will evaluate each component of iLife '09, with the exception of iMovie and Garageband, because I've never used these in iLife '08.

There are numerous benefits of setting up a wireless network with internet sharing. I set one up today, because I wanted to sync various iPhone applications with the Computer. Many applications on the iPhone sync when they are run while their desktop client software is running in the computer, and the iphone is connected via USB. One of such applications is Things. However some other applications like 1Password sync only via a wireless LAN. At my office, I have a wired ethernet connection, so I setup a wireless ad hoc network and all my iphone application sync'ed smoothly. Some other colleagues connected to my wireless aswell and enjoyed a performance of 4Mbps. On the iphone I got over 3Mbps speed, a lot faster than 3G.

Setting up a wireless connection on the mac is easy, and only two steps are requires:

1, Enable Internet Sharing

Go to System Preferences > Sharing.

Enable Internet Sharing and select the interface from which you want to share connection (In my case it was ethernet), and then select the interface through which it will be shared (In my case its the Airport, which is the default for wireless ad hoc networks). A screenshot is shown in the following picture.

2. Setup a wireless adhoc network

Go to the Airport Icon in the Desktop and select
"Create Network". Define a name, and specify a password (if you want one). The built in airport can only create WEP ad hoc networks.

I tried to access my magazine subscriptions on Zinio from the iPhone. It turns out that Zinio has a special website for iPhone users, and the website does display the content in a manner which is suitable for viewing from an iPhone.

But the actual text is horrendous. The displayed text is a compressed bitmapped image, rather than vector based text as in a PDF. This is a problem because once you zoom into the text you start seeing a lot of "noise" surrounding the text, and when you zoom out you don't see the noise, but you don't see the text clearly as well, as shown in the screenshots.

As a general rule, you should only use bitmapped based formats for static displays ie. an image sized at only 1024x780. However if some scaling maybe involved, one should always go for vector based formats, because it is redrawn at every size.

Find some awesome and highly useful spotlight syntax hacks in this blog here

The MacOSX 10.5.5's Finder sucks at handling WebDAV. I was at first glad to connect to the WebDAV server, but it can't sustain a connection while downloading something. After the connection is closed, I can't reconnect because Finder assumes that I'm still connected. The only way I can reconnect from finder is to kill the process manually from the terminal, then I can reconnect to the WebDAV server.

I have tried other WebDAV clients too, including CyberDuck, which seems to have some problems of its own. The best client by far is Transmit, so far it has always worked for me.