Common Paradox Tech Blog

Although there is hardly a shortage of desktop Twitter clients, the native client options for Mac users remain more limited. A few weeks ago, Realmac Software introduced Socialite 1.0, an app that manages Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds and more.

Now another new Mac native client has entered the ring — Kiwi by YourHead. Kiwi doesn’t do multiple social networks like Socialite — its focus is Twitter. It’s a deceptively simple-looking client, but under the hood, the real audience is the power Twitter user.

Look & Feel

Similar to apps like Twitt and Bluebird, Kiwi offers users a number of different themes — they can even create their own. Kiwi’s theme API uses HTML and CSS, which makes creating and altering themes pretty easy.

YourHead is a big player in the RapidWeaver community and already some other RapidWeaver theme designers have created themes for Kiwi. The built-in selection of styles offers lots of different options for the customization junkie.

The first thing I noticed about Kiwi as an application is that it is FAST. Like, extremely fast. Switching from one account or group or saved item to another felt seamless and instantaneous.

For power users that don’t like to leave the keyboard unless it is absolutely necessary, Kiwi has a ton of keyboard commands. Creating tweets, going to replies, direct messages and favorites, selecting accounts, retweeting and more can all be done from the keyboard. Speaking of retweeting, you can do it the official way, and there is also an option to edit and retweet. One really nice feature — you can view a user’s timeline instantly or in a browser from their tweet.

When composing tweets, you can easily append pictures and shorten URLs before hitting send.

Groups, Account Types and Regular Expressions

Kiwi 1.0 does NOT support Twitter Lists. The feature was simply rolled out too late in Kiwi’s development process — but YourHead says it is planned for a future version — probably Kiwi 1.1.

That said, there are lots of options that can create a list-like effect. Kiwi is designed to be used not only with multiple Twitter accounts (if you have them), but with multiple types of accounts. For instance, you can group together a bunch of different Twitter followers’ timelines into one group and then view updates from all of them together. You can also add certain searches or certain search rules to these groups.

In addition to grouping those items together, if you want to keep a certain search term on tap for easy access, you can add it as an account type. Kiwi has a slick little quick account window that you can choose to have open that lets you switch from one account or search term to another.

Perhaps the most advanced feature Kiwi possesses is support for rules and regular expressions. This has tremendous potential, especially if there are terms and phrases you want to keep tabs on. For instance, you can create a rule to automatically hide tweets containing a certain phrase (so if there is a popular twitter meme you want to avoid, you can just add that hashtag to a rule and all of those tweets will be hidden from view). You can also create rules to highlight and color-code content so that you are able to spot it in your timeline.

Other Thoughts

Kiwi is a really impressive Twitter client. It takes the same vertical menu design that has been popularized by the earliest desktop Twitter clients and adds in a lot of features without cluttering things up. Other than lacking List Support and Growl notifications (that’s being worked on, too), this is easily as advanced as any other Twitter client, regardless of platform.

My biggest takeaway with Kiwi is that it is fast. Really, really, really fast. Switching between timelines, searches and search combinations is quick and easy, and updates come in elegantly and without any sense of slowdown.

Kiwi requires Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. It’s $14.95, but you can download a free trial and see how it fits into your work flow.

Reviews: RapidWeaver, Socialite, Twitter

Tags: kiwi, mac, twitter, twitter client

Windows users can finally get in on the integrated Amazon MP3 that doubleTwist users on Macs have been enjoying for what seems like ages. The latest update to the media sync software brings it to version 2.6 on PC (Mac users get a feature-similar 1.0b14), and in addition to the expected bug fixes and Amazon MP3 integration also adds supports for the unannounced Google Nexus One. Seeing as it’s just an Android phone, adding support for one more Android device couldn’t have been a tall order for doubleTwist. doubleTwist added support for the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi soon after they launched.

With Amazon MP3’s music store integration doubleTwist can serve as a full-fledged iTunes sync and store replacement. Its playback controls are a bit lacking, but we have little doubt that ramping doubleTwist up to complete iTunes/Windows Media Player replacement is very much on doubleTwist’s radar.

[via: Gizmodo]

Thanks to gksspot555 for the tip!

As we all know by now, Google Chrome for Mac and Linux are now here, and despite the Mac version missing a few features at the moment, both are earning rave reviews around the web. Meanwhile, a report a couple days ago from Net Applications suggested that the Mac and Linux builds helped push Chrome into the number three browser spot in terms of usage, past Apple’s own Safari. And it could be on the verge of jumping even higher thanks to Google now promoting it on its homepage to all Mac users.

Across all the major web browsers that work on the Mac (Firefox, Safari, Opera, Camino), Google is now placing an overlay on google.com which reads “A faster way to browse the web” and includes a Chrome logo and a button that you can click to be taken to the Chrome for Mac download page. This shows up regardless of if you’re signed into your Google account or not. The only requirement is that you not being using Chrome. Clicking on the “X” will make the overlay disappear.

Release date: Wed, 02 Apr 2008 21:29:00 GMT

[Vimeo Video link]

Pastebot [$1.99 - iTunes link], the delicious-looking new clipboard manager from Tapbots brings their flare for fantastic, and fantastically original user interface to iPhone and iPod touch cut, copy, and paste. (And, yes, insert — it took Apple 2 years and a 3.0 to give iPhone users the much-requested clipboard function to begin [...]

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Pastebot Brings Robotic Clipboard Awesomeness to iPhone Cut, Copy, Paste

If only total dupes fall for click-through advertising on search result pages, and users of Microsoft products are the most likely to click-through, does that mean users of Microsoft products are total dupes? Logically fallacy aside, Microsoft product users might be total dupes, but not for this particular reason.

Chitika, which researches search-targeted advertising, reports that users of Microsoft products are more likely than others to click an ad on a search result page. For example, users of Bing are 75% more likely to click an ad than users of Google. And users of Internet Explorer are 50% more likely than Safari users, and 80% more likely than Chrome users to click an ad. Overall, Windows users are twice as likely as Linux and Mac users to click an ad.

So users of Microsoft products are gullible dupes–easy prey for the mavens of click-through advertising, right? Hardly. In this case the percentage differences are accurate, but the actual click-through rates for all platforms are so low the differences are probably meaningless. For example, 99.85% of Internet Explorer users don’t click-through, compared with 99.34% of Firefox users, 99.50% of Safari users, and 99.79% of Chrome users. In other words, percentage-wise, hardly anyone, regardless of browser, clicks-through. The pattern for operating systems is similar–in all three cases: Windows, Linux, and Mac, more than 99% don’t click-through.

Given the general nature of Microsoft product users–in all fairness it’s a lot more diverse a population than Linux or Mac users–Microsoft product users seem to be doing pretty well in these relative comparisons. Furthermore, there’s nothing here to suggest they are any more or less susceptible to click-through ads than anyone else.

Image Credit: Chitika

Is there something about people who use Microsoft products that makes them more likely to click on an online ad? Some data from search advertising network Chitika suggests so. Earlier this week, we noted that people coming to Websites from Bing are about 75 percent more likely to click on an ad than those coming from Google.

Following that post, Chitika ran some analysis on browsers and operating systems, and it found that users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer are about 40 percent more likely to click on an ad than Firefox users, about 50 percent more likely than Apple Safari users, and 80 percent more likely than Google Chrome users.  The numbers are based on Chitika data from 134 million across 80,000 sites. When it cut the numbers by operating system, Chitika a similar trend.  Windows users are about twice as likely as Linux or Mac users to click on ads.

There’s nothing really wrong with Google’s new beta of its Chrome browser for Mac. There are a couple of interesting features, but there’s just nothing really fantastic about it either. Google’s a big company with plenty of money, and they play with big-boy toys, so they can take the honest truth: Seriously, I was expecting more.

The elves on the Google Chrome team have been especially busy this holiday season. It’s not even Christmas, and they’ve wrapped up and delivered Google Chrome betas for Mac and Linux, and an Extensions beta for Google Chrome on Windows and Linux.

Brian Rakowski, the Google Chrome product manager, dishes out the details on the Official Google Blog. The Google Chrome betas for Mac and Linux, he says, were engineered to meet the demanding expectations of both platforms. Mac users, he says, will be impressed with the almost instantaneous launch time–so fast “there’s hardly even time for the icon in the dock to bounce!” The Mac version integrates with Mac features, such as the Keyhain, spell check, and SandBox for enhanced security.

For the Linux beta, Google remained faithful to the open source community, with more than 50 contributors contibuting to Chrome’s foundation, Chromium. Google Chrome for Linux fits natively with the operating system where possible, including integration of native GTK themes, and updates managed by the standard system package manager.

Google, according to Rakowski, is all too aware that a browser without extensibility just isn’t a browser. But, at the same time, Google didn’t want to jeopardize Google Chrome’s speed and stability. Extensions, according to Rakowski, accomplishes these objectives. Extensions, says Rakowski, “are as easy to create as web pages, easy to install, and each extension runs in its own process to avoid crashing or significantly slowing down the browser.” Rakowski says there are more than 300 extensions now ready for use, but only for Windows and Linux boxes.

Image Credit: Google, Richard Wheeler/Wikimedia Commons

As you’ve no doubt heard by now, the beta versions of Chrome for Mac and Linux launched today (as we anticipated), as did Chrome Extensions (a day earlier than we anticipated). Also as anticipated, extensions are not currently supported in the beta build of Chrome for Mac (though they are for Windows and Linux). But here’s something that’s a little odd: Chrome Extensions have been working in the Mac builds of Chromium (the open-source browser that Chrome is built on) for weeks now, but Google has disabled the ability to install them from the Gallery page even if you’re using Chromium for Mac.

If you visit the Extensions Gallery page from either Chrome for Mac or Chromium for Mac, you’re greeted with a grayed-out “Install” button. Google is clearly just sniffing to see which browser you are using, and if it’s anything on a Mac, they disable the button. But that doesn’t make it any less annoying because if you could find the URL to the actual .crx file, you could install any of the extensions, and they would work. But alas, Mac users are left completely in the dark for now.