Flock 2.5 is a great Twitter client
I spent some time last week writing a short review of Flock for MacUser.
What I hadn't expected to discover was that Flock is an excellent Twitter client, even if you use it for nothing else.
It has a special built-in tab called My World, which is comprised of content widgets under your control. You can very easily set it up to display your choice of saved Twitter searches, which line up in neat columns and even auto-refresh.
Combine this with the built-in support for your own Twitter account (which appears in a sidebar by default), and you have yourself an excellent little Twitter client app. Some people might prefer support for multiple accounts, but for most of us, it's fine.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
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I love my Delicious network
Honestly, I think my delicious network page is the most useful bookmark of the lot. Every day it gives me a condensed summary of what people I know, trust, respect and adore are thinking about, reading, and absorbing. There might be only half a dozen things there on a single day, but I can be sure that all of them will be interesting.
Another thing I love about Delicious, generally: it's not a competition. Other sites, like Digg etc, turn the act of storing a bookmark into a competitive act. Who found it first? Who Digged the most stuff? Who's hot? Who's not?
Bugger all that. Delicious is fantastic because it ignores all that pointless competition. I can store the URLs that interest me, and I can see the URLs that interest the people I respect. What more could you possibly want?
(Image is a screenshot from the Delicious network explorer - there's also an annotated version on Flickr.)
Thursday, May 21, 2009
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How to make a good disk image
and simple, and the idea of having the app icon above, and the
Applications folder shortcut below, works really nicely. I'm not quite
sure why, but it seems to convey the requirement - drag *this* down to
*here* - more clearly than your average disk image layout.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Election communication
going to be filled with this political spam. It'll be worse than
usual, though, because the main parties are losing support and
struggling to get volunteers to go out leafletting.
So there'll be even more crap from tossers like UKIP and thick-headed
racists like the BNP. Oh yippee.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Spectacular roast dinner
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Nutcase
Saturday, May 16, 2009
First effort
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Searching the now with Twitter
I don't host web sites with Bytemark, but they do provide my broadband connection. When things went pear-shaped for them on Sunday afternoon it didn’t just mean that a lot of hosted web sites went offline; it also meant a lot of broadband customers found themselves cut off.
It being Sunday afternoon, it wasn’t a big deal. I soon guessed that the problem wasn’t just my router, and wanted to know when service would be restored, so I pulled out my phone and visited search.twitter.com (using the cellular network, obviously).
The results thread told me all I needed to know. There was clearly a major network problem at Bytemark; engineers were working on it; service would be restored sooner or later.
Even though the problem wasn’t fixed, I felt much better just knowing what it was, and that something was being done about it. I was able to get on with the rest of my Sunday and not concern myself with it.
People have said all sorts of things about Twitter and its potential as a search tool, and this event offers good evidence for its function as a tool for searching the now.
If there’s an event happening that’s likely to affect a bunch of people, the chances are good that at least a few of them are Twittering about it. In this case, it was @matthewbloch, MD of Bytemark, who interrupted his Sunday afternoon to keep followers (and the wider community, thanks to Twitter’s excellent search) up-to-date.
I’ve saved Twitter’s search page as a bookmark on my phone. I have a feeling it’s going to come in very useful there.
Monday, May 11, 2009
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Dungardening
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Photography on a different level
I really love this gallery of photos taken by Barney one afternoon in the winter. Six-year-olds have a completely different view of the world, one that's a metre below adult eye level and looks out on very different things.
He sees the toys lurking under the sofa, he sees the underside of the kitchen table, he sees me peering at my computer. I gave him an old camera for half an hour, and in return he gave me his view of the world.
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
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Strange effect
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
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