Pix from the npost demo event

by Randy Stewart on June 24, 2009

Here are some of my favorite pix from last night’s npost event. Thanks Nathan for organizing gathering of so many good startups.

More pictures are in my npost Flickr set.

TA McCann points to the future - npost demo event

TA McCann points to the future

More pictures are in my npost Flickr set.

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Tweetdeck delivers (what I want in a Twitter app)

by Randy Stewart on June 17, 2009

In my last post, I laid out what I wanted in a Twitter application with Groups and Mobile being high on the list. I wanted to create groups once and to be able to access those groups on my iPhone and desktop. I thought that the easiest way to accomplish this was to create a web app that had a mobile interface.

Another Way

There was another way to create my desired product and that was to have a fully featured desktop app and a fully featured iPhone app and sync your Groups between the two. Syncing, however, is less than ideal.  I have long history of using Desktop and Mobile apps that sync together and generally, syncing was done poorly (data loss or corruption) or at best, slowly.

Enter: Tweetdeck for the iPhone

Tweetdeck for iPhone logo.jpg

Tweetdeck for the iPhone and its desktop equivalent have mostly answered my call for the perfect Twitter application.

It doesn’t change that I don’t particularly like Adobe AIR due to its lack of native OS interface conventions, but Tweetdeck answers most of the feature requests that I outlined previously and works well enough. It even includes some of my “nice to haves”

UI Tour

Tweetdeck for iPhone - All Friends Tweetdeck for iPhone - Groups and Notifications

Reading Tweets, both in “All Friends” and “Groups” as well as a view of the most recent update.  Much like Tweetie, you can then dig into your friend’s profiles and recent Tweets by clicking on their avatar.

Tweetdeck for iPhone - Add New ColumnGroups and Columns

Groups functionality was one of my primary wants in an iPhone app. In many ways, having groups on the go is even more important than at my desktop. Being able to quickly see the folks that matter to you is something that is sorely lacking in Twitter and I look to 3rd parties to make up for this deficiency.

To ease the burden of creating groups in a limited interface, Tweedeck can sync with your desktop client.  Syncing from the Tweetdeck server makes adding Groups from the desktop a snap, although you will have to create an account on Tweetdeck’s Web site.

A few issues

Tweetdeck for iPhone - TMI

The initial view into Tweetdeck shows us a list of “All Friends” in a slightly shrunken view.  I like this view as it immediately gave me a clue that swiping to the right would give me a different view.

What I don’t like about this view is that like the desktop app, Tweetdeck on the iPhone tells users things that they don’t really need to know about. In this case, the number of API calls are displayed,  which is interesting, but not necessarily that useful. There is any number of better ways to do this (limit API calls to avoid this issue altogether or make limiting API calls a preference).  Ask the average Twitter user (let’s say… @Oprah) what an API call is and I’d bet the best you’d get is a blank stare.

That and a few of the other “extra” buttons (left and right arrows, for example) add to the already busy interface.   The worst thing about this is that otherwise, Tweetdeck is almost as minimal an interface as Twitter can have and retain all the extra functionality that Tweetdeck offers.

Tweetdeck - Load More Friends.jpg

Adding Groups

Groups functionality is great to have on the iPhone app, but I had imagined that adding people to groups on the iPhone would be a little tedious. In many ways, Tweetdeck did an admirable job at adding this functionality, but they only pull in your 100 most recently added Friends(I’ve got over 500). Tweetdeck then displays your Friends list alphabetically.

The trouble comes in when you click “load more friends”, Tweetdeck grabs the next 100 people and “fills in the blanks” alphabetically. If I had realized that this is what was happening from the beginning, I’d have clicked “load more friends” 5 times to see the full list, rather than sifting through the list twice to find the folks I wanted to add.

Finally, the app has been a little “crashy,” let’s just say. I’m running the iPhone 3.0 software, so perhaps there is a little blame to spread around.

Tweetdeck for the iPhone – Great 1.0 Product

I’m hesitant to even qualify my opinion of Tweetdeck for the iPhone with a “1.0 product” label, but it’s mostly there.  To some degree, the UI issues that I’ve outlined feel a little niggly given how good this app is otherwise.  Huge thanks to the folks at Tweetdeck for making such a useful, free (for, I suspect, a limted time) application.

You can download the Tweetdeck iPhone app from the iPhone App store and the desktop app for Mac and Windows directly from Tweetdeck.com.

I’ve also posted a Tweetdeck UI gallery on Flickr.

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What I want in a Twitter application

May 27, 2009

After yesterday’s PeopleBrowsr announcement, I started looking around for an “ideal” Twitter client. In terms of features, here’s what I came up with (beyond the baseline Twitter features). They are ordered by importance.
Groups
Ok, here’s my dirty little secret about Twitter, I don’t read everyone that I follow all the time. – gasp -. [...]

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Seattle 2.0 Awards pictures

May 12, 2009

Here are some of my favorite pix from the Seattle 2.0 Awards on May 7, 2009.

Jonathan Sposato

Glenn Kelman

Danielle Morrill

John Cook

Greg Huang

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Pictures from Ignite Seattle 6

May 6, 2009

Here are my favorite pix from April 29th’s Ignite Seattle 6 event.

How and Why to Give an Ignite Talk – Scott Berkun

Intangible Method – Scotto Moore

The Psychology of Incompetence – Ron Burk

Geek Girl: A life Story – Maya Bisineer

Decoding Sticks and Waves – Ken Beegle

The Sanity Hacks of a Stay At Home Mom – Jen [...]

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WSJ on the iPhone

April 16, 2009

The Wall Street Journal launched their iPhone App today, officially showing the NYTimes how a newspaper app ought to work. I love both papers, but man, is the Times sloooooow.
The NYTimes app is astonishingly bad. In the time it takes to update, it should be saving all articles locally, which it does [...]

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Ignite Seattle’s Triumphant Return

April 15, 2009

After it’s globe stomping success, Ignite Seattle returns to Seattle on April 29, 2009. From its humble beginnings here in Seattle, Brady and Bre’s 5 minute talks, with auto-advancing slides (aka a night out at the bar with geeks) has expanded to a world wide phenomenon (and a show from O’Reilly).
There have been Ignite [...]

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What is Boxbe?

April 14, 2009

The company I’ve been working on for the last couple of years is Boxbe, an email overload tool that works with Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail and Google Apps.
Here’s a three minute video that I created some time ago to better explain what Boxbe does and how it might be able to help [...]

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SXSWi 2009 – Happy Cog’aoke Party Pix

March 19, 2009

So, as I was planning a separate post about the parties at SXSW I realized that it would be dominated by one as I had the most fun taking pictures of folks at Happy Cog’s karaoke party.
I’ve done karaoke (badly) and I’ve taken photos at parties before, but this party was special as they [...]

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SXSWi Keynotes in Pictures

March 19, 2009

I upped my photographic game this year with some new camera gear in hopes of documenting SXSWi as best I could. Here are some of my favorites from the keynotes from this year.

Tony Hsieh (and his Zappos crew) want YOU to have good customer service.

Kathy Sierra and Gary Vaynerchuck

Gary Vee of Wine Library TV

Kathy [...]

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SXSWi People and Panels

March 10, 2009

There are numerous ways in which you can build your SXSWi Schedule this year including Sched, cerado ventana and the main SXSW site.
But one thing missing from all of this is a good way to look at the folks who are on a given panel. I made a little spreadsheet that has the panels [...]

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Northern Voice 2009 in Pictures

March 9, 2009

This is the start of more photos being posted here on the blog. I’m taking lots of pictures and most of them just end up in my Flickr feed, but what fun is that?
Here are some of my favorites from Northern Voice 2009:

Nora Young

Eagranie Yuh

Kris Krug

Dave Olson

Roland Tanglao

Chris Heuer and Kim Cathers (not [...]

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Jon Stewart on Twitter

March 3, 2009

My wife got a kick out of this. Perhaps I should be paying more attention to what she says rather than telling all of you on Twitter.
So, does this officially make Twitter mainstream?

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Northern Voice 2009 – Vancouver’s Finest

February 23, 2009

I went to my first Northern Voice 2 years ago after meeting up with some of the organizers at the previous year’s Gnomedex and thinking, “hey, these guys are all right.” Northern Voice is one of my favorite conferences to go to because despite it’s small size, it attracts a wealth of interesting, insightful [...]

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Photo “ownership”

January 9, 2009

Hey everybody, look at me, look at me (or rather look at Vanessa). A pic of mine appeared on CNN yesterday.
While it was uncredited (and unlinked), my personal photography policy dictates that the subject of the photo can do with it what they like. Only fair, I suppose, as it brings up all [...]

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