On 11th December I placed an order with Meninos for a Twitter Mousepad. Choosing a mousepad can be harder than you think – the shinier plastic/rubber topped ones have been a real drag for every mouse I’ve used including the Mighty and Magic mice – and using it directly on my desktop was even worse. But, the description of the Twitter mousepad made me confident that this would be perfect.

It arrived today and I’m so delighted with it. The quality of the cloth material is excellent and it has a rubber backing to keep it in place on the desk. My Magic Mouse glides across it quietly and fluidly.

The Twitter Mousepad is $11.99 plus shipping – in British money the total was around £12.50. A great price for such a high quality mousepad. A Facebook version is also available for the same price or if you really want to go crazy then you can order the Twitter and Facebook Mousepads in a pack together for $17.99 – a saving of $6 over buying them individually.

After sampling the quality of the mousepad, I will have no hesitation about buying from Meninos again. They carry a range of great products for the discerning geek.

Tweetie 2 (iTunes) was released to the App Store last night, shortly after developer Loren Brichter announced to the masses on Twitter that it had been approved. The buzz about it on Twitter felt very similar to that which accompanies the release of a brand new Apple product. It was THAT good.

After I wrote a little about Tweetie 2 a couple of weeks ago, I read some pre-release reviews which confirmed that there were no themes in Tweetie 2, just the one simple theme. I wasn’t entirely sure how I was going to feel about that as Chat Bubbles has been my theme of choice since day one. I didn’t like the thought of having that taken away from me. But, the list of features kept my interest fully there, so I wasn’t going to pass judgement until I had the app infront of me.

Let’s just say I’m now thinking “Chat Bubbles? What Chat Bubbles?”. The simple clean white theme is gorgeous. Simplicity and absolute elegance. The screengrabs of the theme don’t do it justice. See it on your iPhone and you’ll feel the love. I have barely put my iPhone down since I bought Tweetie 2 last night. There’s features I haven’t touched yet – still so much more to play with which is what I love in an iPhone app. Having everything there and fully functional, but still managing to find something even more cool on closer inspection.

My favourite bits of Tweetie 2 so far are the “pull down to refresh” feature which gives that satisfying little pop sound when it’s done, threaded conversations and the little blue neon markers underneath unread tweets, @’s and DM’s. The ‘nearby’ feature is also particularly beautiful. I’m also a huge fan of the new simple silver icon. I think, like the application behind it, it’s simple and elegent. It sits on the opposite side of the same row as my Camera app on my iPhone’s home screen – and looks right at home there.

Rather than do a full review of every feature, I am going to hand you over to the Cult Of Mac who have done a sterling job on that front. One more thing I will say, however, this is worth £1.79 ten times over. I seriously do mean that. I believe fully in supporting developers when they create beautiful applications like this which change the way I use my iPhone and Twitter on a daily basis. £1.79 just doesn’t even begin to cover my appreciation.

Rating:

Tweetie 2 – iTunes [£1.79/$2.99]

As a huge advocate of Tweetie for iPhone and Mac, I was excited to hear what developer Loren Brichter was going to announce today, regarding the next version of the iPhone client. Some people were anticipating an update to the Mac version which was released back in April, but I can’t say that there’s anything I’m waiting to be improved on that. It’s already way ahead of the other Mac apps for Twitter, IMO.

Loren has explained in depth what features will be coming in Tweetie 2, including video recording from the 3GS, drafts manager and threaded conversations like the Mac version – a feature I love and have been desperate for on the iPhone client. I’ll let Loren tell you about the whole heap of other features.

Tweetie 2 for the iPhone will be submitted to Apple this week and we’ll impatiently await the approval. Tweetie 2 is a complete rewrite and a whole new app which will cost exactly the same as it does now, just £1.79/$2.99, for new users and old. I have been following mentions of @tweetie on Twitter and have been surprised to see people complaining about having to pay for the new app. I have been using Tweetie on the iPhone exclusively for almost 10 months and I still can’t believe that this, my most used and loved app on the iPhone, cost only £1.79. That won’t buy you much, nowadays, but it will buy you the best Twitter app you’ll ever need on the iPhone.

o2 UK have teamed up with Twitter so that come August 1st, every o2 customer will be able to turn on text notifications in Twitter to receive replies and direct messages absolutely free. Text updates to Twitter will be part of your normal text message bundle or the cost of a normal text. You can read more on this new partnership, here.

That’s great news. I don’t think I will be taking advantage of it as I receive @reply and DM notification to my iPhone through Tweetie’s Prowl/Growl integration currently and have also purchased Boxcar – Twitter Push Notifications over the weekend to give that a go.

Will you be enabling the free notifications come August 1st?

I am very excited to hear that Tweetie, the best twitter client for the iPhone bar none, is coming to a Mac desktop near you. I have struggled to find a desktop client that I feel truly comfortable with other than Twitterrific. I can’t abide TweetDeck, Twhirl, EventBox or the other twitter clients which also incorporate feeds from Flickr/Facebook/RSS. Twitterrific is a very barebones app compared to the other clients around, but I do like the Mac only exclusivity and the fact that it isn’t a horrid AIR app.

I am hopeful that I can finally banish Twitterrific to the archives when Tweetie for Mac hits the tubes and I expect it will be every bit as elegant as the iPhone app.

I love Twitter chatter, but sometimes there can be just too much noise, especially if there is an event being talked about heavily and people are using those annoying hashtags before the #word. If you couldn’t care less about hearing the chatter about these events, then you’ll be looking for a way of filtering them out – or considering closing your Twitter desktop client until the event is over!

My friend Nik posted a godsend last night, especially for the desktop Twitterrific users out there. It’s just one simple line to pop into Terminal (Applications > Terminal) to filter out certain tweets and hit enter. This is the line I’m using…

defaults write com.iconfactory.Twitterrific tweetTextFilter -string "(please RT|RT please|Facebook|Austin|[sS][xX][sS][wW]|#[sS][xX][sS][wW])"

From Nik’s blog;

The one above is one that I’m using on the desktop (apart from the SXSW mentions) and I’ve used it previously to hide annoying Twitter competitions and the like. To filter out tweets with other terms, simply manipulate the expression in brackets to your needs. You can enter URLs, hashtags and the like to you needs, but be sure to remember that for now, the terminal command will overwrite the existing expression instead of adding things to it so you’ll need to enter the entire thing once again. I remain hopeful that the Icon Factory will add a UI for this functionality (even if it’s just a basic ‘exclude’ list). There’s plenty more options to tinker with via the Terminal if you read the Twitterrific 3.2 Read Me included with the Twitterrific download.

I have a feeling that I will be updating terminal quite a bit. I considered filtering the hashtag altogether, but then that would probably make Twitterrific too quiet! Now, if only Tweetie had a built in filter…

A new service launched on the intertubes yesterday which is one of the most exciting twitter-related services I’ve seen in a long time.

If you’re left wanting more information about a new follower than what Twitter currently supplies in their basic ‘new follower’ notification e-mail then you might want to try Twimailer.

After registering your e-mail at Twimailer it will generate a random e-mail address for you which you just enter into your Twitter account settings as your default e-mail. Then it’s just a question of waiting for that all important new follower so you can see the beautified notification e-mail. It gives you as much information as you’ll need to know about this new follower, including their avatar, location, bio, their following/follower stats aswell as their latest 10 tweets. It’s is a great way to weed out the spammers without even having to leave your inbox. Twimailer is what the Twitter.com new follower e-mails should have looked like by default. Be sure to watch the video on their site for a full walkthrough.

For a while there have been Twitter extensions for other browsers out there but none, to my knowledge, for Safari on the Mac. That was until a few days ago when Safari140 was released. This new extension was created by the developer behind the elegant NewsFire and Inquisitor.

Once downloaded and installed, simply go to File > Post to Twitter where you will first be asked to enter your Twitter credentials. With that complete you can post direct to twitter from Safari and it will auto-fill the current site aswell as auto-shorten long URL’s as you can see in the screengrab below.

This could take the pain out of posting long URL’s on Twitter without having to swing by one of the URL shortening websites first.

Another of David Watanabe’s apps, NewsFire 1.6 Beta 1, now boasts direct posting to Twitter aswell as a very nice updated design.

When the iTunes App Store launched late June, one of the first applications I downloaded to my iPod touch with the 2.0 software update was Twitterrific [opens iTunes]. I use Twitterrific desktop app on my Mac and have always loved the clean simplicity of it. I downloaded the free version on the iPhone as there were some problems with the scrolling (not like butter) and I wanted to see what other apps would eventually come to the app store for twitter. 

Since then I’ve downloaded Twinkle, Tweetsville and Tweetie [all links open iTunes]. I wasn’t too keen on Twinkle thanks to it bugging me relentlessly to broadcast my location, but also because it’s not a dedicated twitter client. So, when I was out and about I’d have random people sending me messages through Twinkle who seemed to want to “hook up” with me – people who weren’t on twitter. I decided to give that up and move back to good ol’ reliable Twitterrific.

Then the buzz was all about Tweetsville. The UI was clean and iPhone-like (although a little plain and boring in my opinion) and the search/trends was an attractive feature. But this turned out to be the most sluggish app of all, taking an age to download tweets even over wi-fi. I paid £2.39 for it and have never regretted an App Store purchase more than this. After less than a week of using Tweetsville I was removing it from my iPhone. When you mention this on twitter then you get a barrage of recommendations of another really great app, but that’s what they said about Tweetsville. However, after seeing Stephen Fry commend Tweetie recently then I thought I’d give it a go – and at just £1.79 then it’s not too bad.

Tweetie is by far the best application for twitter on the iPhone that I’ve used, although I do have one negative which I’ll mention in a moment. Downloading tweets is extremely quick on opening the application – within 2-3 seconds…and that’s over 3G! It has a very attractive iChat-like UI and boasts features such as the ability to view twitter trends and perform custom searches which is something that Twitterrific doesn’t have. You can also follow and unfollow people directly through the app which is great.

Now for the negative that stops this short of getting a 10/10 from me: the image uploading to Twitpic. Tweetie compresses the image so that it strips it’s quality and uploads it showing as being posted from twitpic (in your timeline) and the image is in landscape mode. In Twitterrific when you upload an image to twitpic it isn’t compressed and shows that it’s been posted via Twitterrific in your timeline and the image is also posted in portrait mode as intended. Here’s an example…

Image posted to twitpic through Tweetie
Image posted to twitpic through Twitterrific

Same image but horribly compressed and rotated via Tweetie. If they work on this image posting method then I will use Tweetie full-time, no question. Until then I’ll be switching between Tweetie for tweets and Twitterrific for image uploads.

Edit: Tweetie 1.1 update [available today] fixes the upload issue and now posts in portrait along with ‘from Tweetie‘ in the timeline instead of ‘from twitpic‘. See the comments for more.

I don’t think there’s anyone, anywhere that is as shy as I am. I tell that to people online and they don’t believe me as I have carved out an online life of being the Administrator of a busy message forum for nearly 6 years. That consists of me taking the lead, organising things (and people) so what’s a shy and retiring girl like me doing something that? Ah, I just love the internet for allowing me to be outgoing and nobody would guess until I blurt it out…like now.

A couple of months ago I found a celebrity on Twitter – Robert Llewellyn who played Kryten in British sitcom Red Dwarf. I love Robert Llewellyn. I can’t say I am a big Red Dwarf fan, but I am a big fan of Scrapheap Challenge – a show he presented for many years. I followed him and a couple of times he asked the Twitterverse a question. A question I could answer. But what did I do? I ran away. What if he personally replied to me saying thanks? I couldn’t take that chance so I sat quietly while I watched his other followers/my contacts answer him. I was so angry with myself for bottling it. He’s a normal down-to-earth bloke, no airs and graces so why was I putting him on this pedestal that he would no doubt be very embarrassed about? Because he’s on the telly, silly.

Since then I have actually got over that and have recently replied to a few of his tweets. I didn’t panic, I didn’t break out into a cold sweat and I didn’t prepare to hide under the desk if he replied (which he didn’t, btw). But wow, I have faced something head-on that has plagued me for 35 years and it’s all thanks to Twitter.

Just as I was feeling smug about overcoming that hurdle I found out that another British legend was now on Twitter, the gentleman that is Stephen Fry. I followed him on Friday and yesterday he started to follow me back. What a lovely man who seems to be following just about everyone who’s following him. I have had a bit of a soft spot for Stephen since watching his open and honest documentary about Bipolar Disorder a couple of years ago. As someone who has a Bipolar partner, it was invaluable viewing at a time when I was desperate to understand more about the illness. I thank Stephen for being so candid and open, particularly during those times when the last thing he wanted was to be followed around by a camera crew.

So, whether I will actually personally reply to @stephenfry is quite another matter, I have only just recovered from replying to @bobbyllew afterall!!

So, which celebrities* have you discovered on Twitter?

*Real celebrities from the Acting/TV/Music world, not internet celebrities nonebrities.