accident prone

Since I recently got my android phone back I thought it would be a good time to take a closer look at the apps I use and see if there were better options out there. The first app I decided to look at was my twitter client of choice. For a while now, since I gave up on Twidroid, I’ve been using Seemic. I like Seesmic, it’s got a nice clean interface and does what it needs to do, however after seeing some reviews of other apps I thought I’d give something with a little more flash a try.

The first thing you see with any twitter client is the timeline. Right away I notice that each developer has decided on a different color for their background. Seesmic takes the traditional light background with dark text approach, while touiteur and twicca go with dark backgrounds and light text. To me touiteur is the easiest on the eyes. In addition Seesmic’s choice of a tab like interface and refresh button gives up a lot of screen space that could better be used for real content.

Timeline Winner : touiteur

Next up lets explore how each app lets us interact with a someone else’s tweet. Here each app takes a very distinct approach. Seesmic takes you to a whole nother screen with just that tweet and interface elements to reply, retweet or DM the author, touiteur slides down a panel of buttons with the various ways to interact with the tweet, and twicca pops up a nice looking menu with various options. All three approaches are valid, and I’m not sure I can really pick a winner. Seemic’s approach seems to be the least useful because you need to hit the back button to return to your timeline, but I don’t think that’s a big enough deal to detract from it.

Interaction Winner : 3 Way Tie

When I click on a tweet the main reason is because there’s a link in it or someone else is mentioned. So, how do each of these three apps handle links within a tweet? As you’d expect from the previous comparisons, very differently. Seesmic simply exposes the links like a normal hyperlink in a web page. Touiteur has a special link button when you click on the tweet and it pulls up just the @. #. and http links in a popup. Twicca simply throws the links into its normal click menu. Again it seems like different strokes for different folks, however I think Seesmic’s and Touiteur’s approaches are more user friendly right away. Once you understand all the icons in the Twicca menu though it does make more sense and is certainly a valid presentation.

Links Winner : touiteur

Of course the main reason to have a twitter client on your phone is so that you can tweet out the minutia of your life where ever you happen to have a cell signal. You’d think that presenting a text entry box for you to type 140 characters into would be pretty straight forward, and for the most part you’d be correct. Seesmic and Twicca take a very simple approach, click on a “Compose” button and you are presented with a new screen dedicated to recording your every thought or witty comment and sending it out to the world. Touiteur takes a little bit different approach by adding a pulldown tray to the top of the interface. In this case I think touiteur is a bit too cute for its own good; half the time I pull down the normal system menu when I mean to tweet. Also, touiteur is the only client, at least in the free version, that doesn’t present a geo-location tool.

Compose Winner : Twicca

Finally let’s take a look at how each client presents a user’s profile. It’s pretty hard to mess this one up, but for some reason I feel like Twicca did. Too much space taken up by the empty blackness. Seesmic and and Touiteur both take a pretty similar approach, shoving as much content as they can into the screen while still staying readable. Once again Seesmic loses points because of its intrusive interface.

Profile Winner : touiteur

Overall these are all very usable apps, and your personal preferences may lead you to chose one that I don’t think is the best. I’m sure I missed some of the things that make each app shine, for example Twicca opens image links (at least twitpic ones) within the app, where as the other two clients defer to the browser. As far as free apps go all three of these are incredible, none crashed while I was using them and they’re all pretty lightweight, which on my aging G1 is an issue. Since they’re all free you might as well download them all and give them a spin for yourself. I do, however, have to pick a winner, and in my mind it’s pretty clear. I think I’ll be buying the pro version of touiteur just to see how it could possibly be better than the free version (and at under 2 euros it’s worth every penny)
Overall Winner : touiteur

Download the winner via the market here

This weekend was my first without my beloved G1. After many drops and a cracked screen, that it somehow lived through, the final straw was Wayne pulling it off of my nightstand, by the recharging cable, and dropping it to the hardwood floor three feet below.

Since I still have a few months on my contract before I can get a decent upgrade price on a new Nexus 1 or similar smartphone and I needed something to at least receive and make calls I went to my local store and asked what the cheapest phone they had available for me was. It turns out that the Nokia 1661 was their answer. While certainly not a pretty phone it’s at least small and quite thin. I barely notice it in my jeans pocket, however after using it for a few days I’ve discovered that I don’t really have much of a reason to notice it in my pocket anyway. Gone are the days of instant gratification via web searches, location based applications, and any of the benefits of social networking. What will happen to my mayorships? How will I get those new stamps on my passport? How will I see people’s responses to my snarky comments? At least I still have Google via SMS. Sadly my T9 skills have withered since being spoiled by a full qwerty keyboard, so even the simple queries of gooSMS take forever.
I thought that losing my smartphone might be a bit freeing; no longer tethered to the internet. However in the first few days, at least, that is not the case. I have at least a week before a friend sends me a replacement G1 (thank you Aero), so maybe by then I’ll have discovered the joy that is the retro mobile phone, but right now I’m just not feeling it.
Pros:

• Small
• Thin
• Built in Flashlight (I’m serious)
• FM Tuner/Radio

Cons:

• Everything else…

buy your own (different strokes I guess)

I’ve seen a couple different approaches to getting away from this whole mouse and keyboard thing that’s just not working so well for computing.

First there was the 10/gui which uses all ten of your fingers on a touchpad.

Now there’s g-speak that was demoed at TED, which is much like the interface used in the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report.

I honestly don’t see how either really help me get my TPS reports done any more efficiently, but both do have some good ideas that I think could make it into a consumer OS.

Personally I think that an iPad like device that supports more than two finger multitouch on top of a real display would make an awesome peripheral that would compliment a keyboard and mouse driven interface. Think of having all your photoshop palettes on a touch screen in front of you, separate from your actual work area, or, more applicable to me, a screen with all the various WoW functions I want to be able to access at a moments notice but don’t really want cluttering up my window into the game world.