foomandoonian’s halfblog

There are plenty of iPhone Twitter apps, but I find that none of them do everything the way I want. I'm thinking about writing a feature-for- feature comparison. Are there any other major apps I should consider?

Sent from my iPhone

Another list, primarily for my benefit, so I don't forget anything. Give me a shout if you're attending any of these, and let me know if I've missed some cool event.

Cardiff Photomarathon
Saturday June 20th
The deadline for entry was June 10th. I have my ticket and plan to be at the Wales Millennium Centre at 10am.

CardiffWebScene, Summer Meetup
16 July at Funky Buddha

WordCamp UK
18-19 July at Future Inn
I'm probably looking forward to this one the most. I need to get my WordPress blog up and running by then!
Tickets £35, still on sale.

Ignite Cardiff #3
15th October
I really enjoyed the last Ignite, so hopefully I'll make it to this one. No plans to talk myself!

Cardiff Design Festival
October
I don't know anything about this yet, but it sounds fun.

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There's a list of events at the Cardiff Web Scene site.

I did a bit more work this week, but not as much as I would like. The PSD is in a bit of a state at the moment, so I've cut out some details to show off, including some application windows.

Note the terminal tab at the bottom, so Linux power-geeks can change the desktop to something that lets them really get under the hood!

I've also allocated a little space that Google could use to display ads - I need two more, so leave suggestions in the comments. Winning suggestions will be used. :D

More next week. Enjoy.

Last night I stumbled across this Photoshop mockup I have 2/3rds completed of a potential GUI for a Google operating system. This was created before Android, Chrome and Wave existed (as far as anyone knew) and is based on nothing but my own thinking.

I rather like the look of it, so I'm going to finish it off over the next few lunchbreaks. You're welcome to share any thoughts you have on the subject in the comments. :)

Apparently in the last three years almost £21,000 worth of gadgets have been lost by Welsh Assembly civil servants and even the odd minister, Huw Thomas reports.

Breakdown of losses
2005: no losses were reported
2006: 16 laptops lost/stolen [All civil servants]
2007: 4 laptops lost/stolen [All civil servants]
2008: 8 laptops lost/stolen [All civil servants]; 7 blackberries lost/stolen [6 civil servants and 1 Minister/Deputy Minister]; 2 mobile phones lost/stolen [All civil servants]

I realise I haven't been posting many pictures lately, but hopefully I will post some of the backlog this week. In the meantime, here are a few from today, taken while Geocaching in the greater Newport area.

I just received my Griffin Clarifi case today, and I'm pretty pleased with it. The results - as you can see for yourself - are reasonable. I want to be able to take pictures of ISBN numbers, QR codes and Geocaching travelbug numbers, so I consider this something to compensate for the poor iPhone camera, and not really a tool for taking real macro pictures. If you have a similar expectation, I don't think you will be disappointed.

The case itself is pretty smart and feels nice to the touch. It comes with a screen protector and a cloth too. Don't pay the £25 Carphone Warehouse want though, I got mine for £18 on Amazon, and there's currently a much better deal on Play.com.

Here's an innocent link being shared on Twitter:

Free Font FP Head Pro by Fontpartners http://post.ly/T7r Font72

I don't want to pick on @imjustcreative, but this is a complete link fail. It could only be worse if it used a framing short URL.

When you click on the link you get taken to Graham's Posterous blog, then to fontsquirrel. They appear to be the vendor, but confusingly their download button takes you offsite and dumps you on fontpartners.com. You have finally arrived at your destination, but now you have to remember what the font you wanted was called and find it yourself.

This is the link you needed in the first place: http://fontpartners.com/fpHead_pro.html

Spot anything wrong? Yup, that's right, no 'free download' link. Just the option to buy at the top.

In the time it has taken me to compose this, @imjustcreative replied to my moan on Twitter:

@Foomandoonian now ur just being lazy and whingy, just be thankful you have a link at all :)

Yeah, thanks buddy.

About a year ago I gave up caring who started following me on Twitter, largely because of the proliferation of blatant spammers. I put up a note on my bio saying that if people really wanted me to reciprocate, the should send me a message, and I would certainly follow back if they were an interesting real person, and not some spam account (or worse). This still seems perfectly reasonable to me.

More recently though I decided I should take a more active interest in those who choose to follow me. I started using the excellent Topify, which makes it easy to identify spammers and I check out anyone who seems interesting.

Consequently, I've spotted an annoying trend.

There are many, many users who follow about 200 more people than follow them back. They are taking advantage of the fact that about half of the people that they follow, will follow them back! For whatever reason a large number of people feel it is the done thing to just blindly follow back anyone who follows them, however spammy, offensive or bizarre the new follower is! Personally, I don't understand this behaviour in the slightest: I don't want spam in my Twitter stream - so I don't follow spammers. It's simple.

Nonetheless, if you want to steadily grow your follower base, add 100 new people a day. Then, after you've been doing this for a few days, go back and unfollow all those who didn't follow you in return, while continuing to follow new people. This way your ratio will always be near enough 1:1, making you look legitimate and popular. Eventually, when you reach an acceptable target (say, 10,000 followers) you can have a big purge and get rid of a lot of the mindless sheep you have accumulated. Say, 20-30% of them. Now it looks like you are a power user. Any new visitors to your profile will assume that you are hugely important and that maybe they should listen to you too.

So there you go, now you can claim to be an SEO-demigod, and have huge numbers of low-quality followers seeming to back it up.

Or you could just use Twitter like a normal person.

Twooshes: 147
(Messages with exactly 140 characters)

Twitter ranking: 29,313
Being the 30,000th most popular actually doesn't seem too bad!

TwitterGrade: 99.5 (out of 100)
I don't know what that means either!

@ replies
Apparently I only reply to 41.65% of messages directed at me. I suspect a lot of those @ messages are in fact retweets, but I should probably still try to improve this percentage.

My first sixteen tweets

The usual noob rubbish (in rererse chronology)

• Gah! No internet!
  1:21 AM Sep 18th 2007
• Check out my new monster!
  7:00 PM Sep 16th 2007
• photagger.com The Fundamentals of Illustration.
  10:17 AM Sep 1st 2007
• Bighugelabs.com
  12:27 PM Aug 30th 2007
• I've never been able to link my Twitter with my IM! GRR!
  3:43 PM Aug 23rd 2007
• Work boring.
  7:49 AM Aug 20th 2007
• C'mon weekend!
  4:33 AM Aug 17th 2007
• Trying sandles for the first time. I have cold toes!
  1:01 PM Aug 9th 2007
• Twitter RSS working?
  9:13 AM Jul 12th 2007
• Hello?
  2:54 PM Jul 9th 2007
• Testing transmission...
  9:02 AM Jul 6th 2007
• Train delayed *again* because of 'a defect on the line. Sigh!
  1:26 AM Jan 26th 2007
• Wanting to go to bed, but playing with Twitter instead. Just watched E2 of the new 24 - not so hot :(
  4:17 PM Jan 25th 2007
• Yay, Phone working :) 2:26 PM Jan 25th 2007
• Not having much luck setting up my phone or IM!
  2:17 PM Jan 25th 2007
• Trying twitter for the first time...
  1:54 PM Jan 25th 2007

Info from: Twitter Counter, TweetStats, Twitter Grader and My Tweet 16.