Tag: app

Review: Twitter vs Twitter

Like most people, I use Twitter. I don’t always use the official Twitter tools for that, though. For example, I rarely use the website itself as it’s slow and annoys me. I’ve almost always used Twitter apps on my computers, too.

In July I decided to try using the official Twitter app again. I’d stopped when, at some point, they stopped working on it. Since they’ve picked it back up, I felt I should try it out. As a whole, I like it 90% but … well let me explain.

Tweetbot

This is my normal, go-to Twitter app. I’ve used it for a couple years, and it meets nearly all my needs for a Twitter app. I can have multiple accounts, which is a must-have for me, and it separates my @-replies from my likes/retweets. I really like that. It also makes those @-replies a different color in my timeline so they stand out.

But… It only tracks likes/retweets for while the app is open. So if I log off, get a million retweets, and log back in, I’ll never know. Also it lacks some of the basic Twitter features like being able to report users and seeing if my other accounts have messages etc I need to pay attention to. I have to click to expand the other accounts to see what’s going on.

Interestingly, all third party apps, be it iOS or MacOS, seem to have this issue with the notifications. They just can’t keep track if you’re not logged in. I’m guessing it’s a matter of the API and limiting calls. Most annoyingly, recently Twitterific has just stopped showing me @-mentions from people I don’t follow.

Twitter

Currently it has a brain and does everything you can do on the web. Multiple accounts, which I can see at a glance who has an alert or message, and it’s easy to switch between them. One click. I can see

Downside? Sometimes when I log back in, the Live Stream is messed up. Also the notifications and mentions and replies are all jumbled up, in the worst ways. I can’t just see replies or likes or mentions. There’s no indication that a message IS a mention in my main-timeline. And the alerts that tell me I have an unread are for notifications and mentions combined.

That I can’t easily find my mentions, which I want to reply to, sucks.

So Which Wins?

Right now, Twitter’s app is winning for the simple reason of easy user status, easy user switching, and actually being able to see all my likes/retweets. Which is important in some cases. It certainly sucks that I can’t easily identify my replies, and I can’t separate mentions from notifications like I can in the web-app, but the reliability of the API is (currently) worth it.

11 August, 2017
Hiya: Bye-a Spammers!

Do you get calls from scammers and telemarketers?

Trick question! We all do!

I stopped getting so many recently, thanks to Hiya. The claim?

Hiya identifies the calls you want to pick up and automatically blocks the ones you want to avoid.

And guess what? As of iOS 10.1 it sure does. I installed it after a day when I had eight scammer credit card calls in a row. In November, a day happened when I got a series of robocalls, and I didn’t answer any of them. My phone flashed, said it had a call, and then it went away, like a hangup. Curious, I popped into my call log to see who’d butt dialed me and saw Hiya flagged the number as a scammer.

They were right. They’ve been nothing but right since I installed it and configured it, and I’ve been unbothered by crazy phone calls.

Setting up the app is onerous, I’ll warn you. On an iPhone, after I installed Hiya, I had to go in to Settings -> Phone -> Call Blocking & Identification. There I had an option for Hiya to allow the app to block calls and provide caller ID. And once I toggled that on, it took minutes for my phone to sync everything up but … Once it was done, the app worked exactly as expected.

The bother went away.

Now for the dark side. Hiya needs access to your contacts. Their privacy policy isn’t fully clear on what they do with it, but they do say they take the numbers in your contacts to build a whitelist. After all, people you add to your contacts aren’t likely to be spammers. But they also claim not to use your information, sell it, or market to your contacts. They also don’t sell to 3rd parties.

As a California resident, I can write and request (once a year) for a list of everyone they gave my information to, so I may do that later, but they appear to be on the up and up. They’re FTC governed, though given that the drama with all this started because they’re doing fuck all at stopping spammers, your milage may vary.

Me? I’m kicking scammers to the curb.

18 November, 2016
Postbox: Desktop Email That Doesn’t Suck

While I greatly prefer to use Apple’s default apps whenever possible, I’ve been using Postbox for my email for a while now, especially since I switched over to Gmail for my email hosting.

While you can use Mail.app with Gmail, it has a lot of issues. I’m not a fan of Gmail in a web browser, either, though I do use it for other things. I like having an app separate to my browser where I can read email. Gmail was built for … well … the browser. It’s never really been a happy marriage to Mail.app, and that’s because Gmail’s IMAP isn’t really IMAP.

Enter Postbox.

This is an app based on the open source Thunderbird, but I find it much easier to use. It has a Windows and Mac client, and it looks clean. Since the recent update this year, it’s a purchase I’m happy to have made.

I currently have two email accounts, one is my Gmail account and one is my ipstenu.org email… Except that second email actually houses a dozen aliases. They all get funneled to different folders based on which alias they’re sent to (or who sent the email at all). My goal was to have only my important emails land in my inbox, which basically means my wife or my family.

Postbox pretty much just works for me. It’s well documented for how to configure for gmail and it lets me use my keyboard to navigate between folders. I love the arrow keys to go up and down and see what my email is.

About the only thing that annoys me is there’s a random [Gmail] folder I can’t seem to get rid of. Also you have to be careful about the Gmail All Mail folder being too large but that’s really a problem with Gmail more than any app. In fact, it’s most of why Mail.app is so terrible to use with Gmail.

Postbox isn’t perfect. It can suck up a lot of memory, and there is some hands-on configuration. This is no ‘set it an forget it’ email client, but again, that’s back to Gmail being a giant moron with regards to IMAP. When compared with Mail.App, I find it more reliable if you have multiple accounts, but also if you have a lot of dynamically sorted folders. Like I do.

If you’re just using one Gmail account, or you don’t have a complex set of filters and rules, this is overkill. But if you do, give Postbox a try. It has a free trial after all.

4 November, 2016
Review: Spark Love for Your Gmail

Moving my email to Google Apps has, thus far, been interesting. I don’t regret it, and consolidating multiple emails down to three was a good choice. The learning curve of adding in email aliases so I can mail from all the accounts I use, and the limits of Gmails shitty filters so everything is funneled to the right place, has been tricky.

As I mentioned before, I have a ton of aliases. Adding them in on the Google Admin back end (just renamed G Suite) is weird but easy enough. To be able to email from them, you have to also add them in via the normal Gmail web app. It’s tucked under Settings > Accounts, and under “Send mail as”, click Add another email address.

But if you don’t want to use the web app (and I don’t), Gmail can be a bit of a turd. It doesn’t work great with the desktop Mail.app, and it works terribly with iOS’s mail. Gmail and Apple are just at odds with how email works. They both want to control your experience and redefine email in different ways. Frankly I prefer the Mac way, but that’s personal preference.

What is a universal problem is that I needed a way to email from my aliases, and if you set up email as Google Mail in the iOS mail app … you can’t.

Yes, you read that right. It is flat out impossible to set up email aliases for a Google mail account. If you want to use the iOS mail app and Goggle email and aliases, you have to set up Gmail as an IMAP app, and that’s sort of a shit show in the making. Gmail’s IMAP implementation is non-standard, to put it simply. Among other things, you can only use 15 connections to IMAP per account. If I had the desktop app open and my iPhone and iPad, weird shit happened.

Now, there are solutions. You could use the Gmail app, but it sucks and doesn’t have an Apple Watch component. Also it’s ugly. Excuse me. It’s basic. You could also use Google’s Inbox app, but you have to use Inbox and the email filters aren’t as robust.

This leads us to our final solution. Spark.

This app was something I’d played with before, as it had email alerts on the Apple Watch, and I wanted to get pinged for some work emails while updating all DreamPress installs over at DreamHost. Sadly, the fault of the app not meeting that need is Gmail, again, which has no way to filter properly and send an alert only when an email meets specific criteria.

What Spark does do is everything else. It has a Watch component, it syncs between my iPad and iPhone, it looks like an iOS app, it acts like a Google app, it pulls in the features people rave about Inbox, and it has email aliases that are simple to set up. Whew. The only thing it doesn’t do is show me a count for unread messages in my folders.

I can live with that.

14 October, 2016
Calypso

You’ve heard about it. Calypso, the WordPress desktop editor for Macs. I’ve been using it and I’m going to give you a quick rundown on what I like and what I don’t.

Like

First of all, it’s Open Source, which is great to look at. Anyone can poke at it and play with it. It’s also a nice GUI to use. Markdown works out of the box if you have it set up in Jetpack. That’s awesome since I’ve gotten very used to using it thanks to Jekyll.

It’s very fast as well, which is great. Fast is good. It also saves rather quickly, even when I’m on some shitty wifi. It’s much faster than using the native WordPress editor.

There have been some bumps in the road, but the development is open to comments and suggestions and steering. Some of the decsions made make sense from every angle except the end users. Users use things in weird ways and, once explained, development seems willing and able to adjust.

Dislike

There’s no spell check. This makes me very sad (I’ve been told it’s a feature request). Clicking back and forth between my sites is a little annoying, and I can’t easily hide sites (or reorder them). There aren’t tabs either, which means I can’t write on three or four posts at once. Yes, I totally do that.

You can’t do Custom Post Types. Yet. This is a deal breaker for one of my sites. Basically I can’t manage my WordPress eCommerce store with this. You also can’t change color schemes. I somewhat wish that it would pick up my user settings and use the profile color from MP6 that I selected there. That way I’d have purple for some posts, green for others, and I’d always easily know where I was.

On the Fence

I don’t really like that it forces me to use Jetpack, but at the same time, the REST API isn’t in core yet, so this makes sense. Similarly, I don’t like that it’s Mac only, but I understand why. Unlike ‘traditional’ software development, the people on the WordPress.com project are primarily Mac users. Of course they went to Mac first. Since it’s open source, I’m hoping someone figures out how to Windows it up soon. Making it Unixy shouldn’t be too hard, since Mac is running Unix.

Back to Jetpack, I would love to see this forked and decoupled from Jetpack, using the REST API instead. Not because I hate Jetpack (quite the opposite) but because I’d like to set my father up with this, and he travels to China where WordPress.com (and Jetpack) are problematic thanks to the Great Firewall.

All in All, I Like It

So far, so good. I like Calpyso and it’s no great effort to remember to use it, unlike pretty much every other desktop app for WordPress. And yes, I’ve tried those.

7 December, 2015
Mapping the Apple Watch
While in Japan, I had the chance to use my Apple Watch to get around and I figured out something.

For walking or driving, the Apple Map app is the best to use with the Apple Watch. Not only do you get turn by turn directions with the haptic taps, but you can quickly see what’s next if you’re not sure what side of the street to be on. The haptics I love:

A steady series of 12 taps means turn right at the intersection you’re approaching; three pairs of two taps means turn left…

I use this feature constantly. It’s brilliant to be able to walk around and enjoy the area I’m in without worrying that I’ll get too terribly lost. As I walked through Kanda, my wrist tapped “tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap” and I turned left like a boss. The only time I used my phone was when I was at a five-way intersection. I can even use it to walk from my father’s apartment to his mother-in-law’s house a few blocks away. Or the 7-Eleven (which are awesome in Japan).

For public transportation, the Google Maps app is brilliant. No. It’s phenomenal. Ueno station, in Tokyo, is one of the more complicated and confusing stations I’ve ever seen. It’s crowded, it has a damn shopping mall on top of it, and it’s where seventeen major train lines meet. The Google Map can, most of the time, tell me what track to be on and when for what train.

Ueno makes Penn Station look tiny.

But Google Maps can’t do ‘both.’ In fact, I’ve learned the Google Maps app is getting worse at things. You see, you go through Ueno to the Keisei Skyliner (the train to the airport) when you take the train from my dad’s apartment to Narita. It’s very simple. Takasaki line from Ageo to Ueno, exit Ueno via the South (not the Park) exit. Turn right. Pass the duck. Done.

Instead of showing you a walking route, when I asked Google Maps to get me to Narita, it drew a straight-as-the-crow-flies line from Ueno Station to Keisei Skyliner. Yeah. Not so much there, Google-San.

It only got worse when I wanted to take the train from Ageo to Kanda for WordCamp. You’d think that Google would be able to alert me, since they have an Apple Watch App, with taps “Hey, get off the train at the next stop.” But they don’t. In fact, the Apple Watch app just lists the directions, not very well, and doesn’t give me alerts. Even worse, you can’t easily track from the iPhone to the Watch. When I put in a direction on my Apple Maps, it automatically triggers the map on my Watch. Google Maps only shows ‘recent searches’ and Work and Home.

It’s an absolute fail to use the technology properly.

To make Google Maps ‘right’ for the Watch is pretty simple.
1. Direction alerts. Tell me when to turn left or right. Steal it from Apple or make your own.
2. Change train alerts. Tell me when I should get up. This will prevent people from sleeping through their stops.
3. Give me easy directions to anywhere. Let me set up a path on my phone and immediately transfer it to my Watch.
4. Use Siri. “Hey Siri, use Google Maps to get me home.”
Four things. I’d settle for the first two, though I think the first three should be a priority for user experience.

Until then, I’ll have to use my iPhone for transportation in a strange land, and my Watch for walking around the planet.
18 November, 2015