Reeder for Mac Phoney icon!

Since Reeder for Mac’s beta is now public (and really kickass), I obviously needed a Phoney icon. Hell, I didn’t even realize it was out until Josh Bryant asked me for a custom icon! 

Well I’m glad he asked, because now I’m using the nicest RSS reader I’ve played with. And I’ve made a cool looking icon!

Enjoy,

M

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My thoughts on Bluebird

The first beta of the long awaited OSX Twitter App “Bluebird” has finally been released. It’s been in development for quite a while, and kept very hush-hush by it’s team, Matt Patenaude and Laurent Baumann. While I am very happy with the first Beta, there are a few things I would love to see implemented. None of this is me complaining, or begging for changes, I just think that some of these things could enhance the usability of the app.

There is just one show-stopping bug that I’ve been the victim of, but I’ll cover that last.

1. A Hotkey to show and hide the window:

@LBaumann has already mentioned that something similar to this would be included in a future update. “Quicktweet” is the term that’s been thrown around.

2. Menubar-only option:

@LBaumann has seemed quite adamant about his feelings about this topic. He doesn’t agree that Bluebird should have this. I would still like to see it, as having the option would be nice, but a “quicktweet” hotkey would solve this for the most part.

3. The ability to copy a tweet’s permalink via shortcut or menu:

On themes that include a dropdown menu for each tweet (including the iChat Boxes theme), clicking “Permalink” opens the tweet in a browser window. It would be nice to be able copy a link to the clipboard for pasting someplace else.

4. Built-in twitter search (search.twitter.com):

Incorporate search.twitter.com into Bluebird’s built-in search box. Maybe something similar to Firefox’s dropdown search menu:

5. Built-in search can return irrelevant results:

Why is this a result for the word ‘bird’?

6. Stop the tweet list scrolling automatically when new tweets arrive.

7. Ability to navigate DM threads by hotkey (cmd-arrow or just arrows).

8. Built-in Emoji:

@MattPat told me this is already a possibility for the next release.

9. Display name instead of Twitter id?

This is pretty small, but it’d be nice to display the user’s “Name” instead of their Twitter id. I’m not sure if this is tied to the theme or the application itself.

10. Link Shortening:

I pasted a decently long URL into Bluebird earlier today and once I hit ‘enter’, it cut off and the link didn’t work. It’d be nice for included support for the different link shortening services (TinyURL, Bit.ly, etc.).

11. Twitpic support?

This is something small and unneeded that would be “nifty”. Not necessary by any means, but neat nonetheless.

12. Random missing tweets?

This is my biggest concern so far. Seemingly very often, chunks of tweets will go missing from the feed displayed in Bluebird. If I pull up Twitter on a web browser, a complete list of tweets will be displayed, however several of them could be missing from the Bluebird feed. @MattPat mentioned to me that he could know what the problem is. I really do hope it gets fixed, because my eagerness to use this app could be dampened by it not showing every tweet.

An example of this problem can be seen here:

Overall I think Bluebird has a very strong first showing. I am enjoying it a whole lot, and I’m very excited to see what the guys at {13bold} come up with next.