Statement by Apple’s Board of Directors

CUPERTINO, Calif. — We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today.

Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve.

His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts.

I am at a loss for words, but I do want to say…

Thank you for everything you did, Steve. Thank you for touching our lives & making them better. We will all deeply miss you.

After a good night of sleep, some Twitter users wake up and want to see what’s been happening on their feed for the past 8 hours. Open up Twittelator Pro and it loads the last 200 tweets. For some people that follow more people than others, one could have a lot more than 200 tweets from people that they’re following since they went to bed or even during a long, busy day at work. Normally I would go to my computer and open up Twitter’s website and scroll back through all of the tweets that I missed. That is just a pain though. It would be so much easier to just load more than the last 200 tweets so one can get caught up on everything.

VS

Along comes Tweetbot from Tapbots, makers of Calcbot, Weightbot, Pastebot, & Convertbot. Tapbots makes some great looking & functioning apps and this includes their latest app, Tweetbot. It was billed as a great replacement for the official Twitter iPhone app (formally Tweetie). Seeing how Tapbots already made some great apps, I decided to buy Tweetbot when it first came out and give it a good work out. Normally, I don’t buy Twitter apps, but since Tapbots has great apps, I thought it was a no-brainer. Currently, the price is $2.99 from the App Store.

After trying out Tweetbot, I did find it lacking some (what I thought) basic features and functionality that I was used to in Twittelator Pro, but it was only the first version of the app and the developers already had updates planned out. So I went back to my favorite, Twittelator Pro and patiently waited for updates to Tweetbot.

A few more updates to Tweetbot and I was very happy with the way it was progressing, but still disappointed that some functionality was not there in the app that was used to in Twittelator Pro. Another update and now Tweetbot had notifications and I was quick to get in on that, due to the limited amount available at the time. The notifications worked great, but I was still using Boxcar to get notifications from Twitter.

Recently, I’ve been getting more and more frustrated with Twittelator Pro and its inability to load more than 200 tweets after a long period of time not opening the app. I know there is the feature there, but it doesn’t work. And what’s the point of having a feature listed if it doesn’t work? I decided to use Tweetbot to catch up on tweets I missed from my friend feed and eventually just kept opening it up to view tweets on a regular basis.

The design of the app is just as nice as any of the previous apps from Tapbots. No complaint there. And I can even report spammers to Twitter in the app and TweetBot removes the spam tweet from my @mentions. It’s nice when it you can report spammers, but for some reason, that function is not working in Tweetbot. I believe that it’s probably someone on Twitter’s side that is causing it, but I have tweeted to several of Tapbots Twitter accounts with no reply from them. That’s just bad customer service and puts a big frown on my face. Andrew Stone, the developer of Twittelator, has also not replied to a few of my recent tweets to him in regard to a few issues I’ve noticed in Twittelator Pro (another big frown on my face).

After just playing with this feature again in Twittelator Pro, it just doesn’t work smoothly for me. It seems to load only a few tweets more at a time (maybe about 20-50). ARGH. That’s a lot of tapping the “More” button to load more tweets. With Tweetbot, it’s about 2 taps and I have all of my missing tweets I want to read.

For the past 2 weeks I’ve been using Tweetbot 98% of the time now and will continue to use it for now. Sometimes people jump from app to app to app to app until they find one that works the best for them. I’m usually pretty loyal to people and companies that treat me well. Both app developers have done so in the past, but sometimes just a simple little thing can cause a change. I’ll continue to have both on my iPhone, but don’t know who will eventually come out as my primary Twitter app.

Pros & Cons of both Apps

Tweetbot – Pros
• Loads more (200+) tweets more effectively.
• In-app web browser has back, forward, stop buttons.
• Notifications in app
• Removes spam tweet from @mentions after reporting spammer

Tweetbot – Cons
• No ability to use TwitLonger
• Unable to RT tweets from users set as private

Twittelator – Pros
• Displays images in the tweet
• UI for tweets – contains reply/RT, view conversation, view user
• Easy to display user’s RTs, RTs to user, RTs by user on refresh
• Ability to use TwitLonger
• Able to RT tweets from users set as private
• Webdings & emoji built into the app

Twittelator – Cons
• Unable to load more tweets than the max 200 tweets.
• Does not remove spam tweet from @mentions after reporting spammer

The little fucker that's been driving me mad!

After a bit, I decided to enlist some help to figure this out. I asked my Mac expert friend and she was clueless. So, I decided to enlist the help of John & Dave from the Mac Geek Gab podcast from The MacObserver. For weeks we tweeted & emailed back and forth. I followed their advice, look here, look there, and sent them log files. They were stumped. Completely and utterly. I stumped the guys from Mac Geek Gab. I did it.

I assured them also that it wasn’t anything to do with iStat Menus (great piece of software from bjango).

After a few tweets not even an hour ago, they had me email them a list of items in a few folders (LaunchAgents, LaunchDaemons, & StartupItems). I sent off the list to them and decided that I’d Google “mysterious menu bar item” one more time.

A-HA! A new post from the Apple Support forums from the end of January 2011! And in that thread there was a link to another thread in the Apple Support forums. I read and I read. BOOM! Check Intego’s VirusBarrier. After a recent update to their software people started seeing this mysterious menu bar item that showed network traffic. HEY! That’s what MY mysterious menu bar item was.

In the Preferences for VirusBarrier X6 click on the “Traffic” tab. In the bottom section there is a checkbox called “Display network traffic in menu bar”. I unchecked that and BAM! The mysterious menu bar item was GONE from my menu bar.

DAMN YOU INTEGO! DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL! You drove me crazy over the period of months trying to figure this fucking thing out!!!! YOU BASTARDS!

John & Dave from Mac Geek Gab, THANK YOU for all of your help! Please share the info I emailed you with the rest of your listeners!

2 fans, Bilal & Godzfire, have worked hard to get working updates out for the Mac (not sure if they’ve done a Windows update), but unfortunately they’re only way to get word out is via the user comments section of the official System 47 website. The original creator of System 47 has been unreachable by all attempts made. Bilal & Godzfire are working on taken ownership of System 47 on MacUpdate and maybe Version Tracker soon. Right now, you can grab the Fan Updated Mac version of the System 47 screensaver here.

Hopefully Bilal & Godzfire will let me know when they have some updated info to share. Great work so far guys!

That was a Japanese textual emoji. It’s a text-based representation of the graphical emoji that you’ve seen before back 2 years ago when Apple refused to put those cute graphical emoji on all iPhones, except for Japanese ones. Eventually there were iPhone apps that would let you enable them on iPhone OS 2.x or 3.x. Now on iOS4 you can also get the textual versions too.

How? Just go into Settings – General – Keyboard – International Keyboards – Add New Keyboard… and add Japanese (Romanji).

Once you do that, just open any app that uses the keyboard (your favorite Twitter app, Messages, Mail, etc…) and hit the globe key at the bottom left (highlighted in red below). Hit that globe key until you see see the Japanese on the keyboard. If you already have the graphical emoji already installed, you’ll have to hit the globe key twice.

Hit the 123 key and you’ll see the ^_^ key in the bottom right (highlighted in red below).

Now you’ll see a little popup with a few textual emojis and a right pointing “More” arrow (highlighted in red below). Hit that “More” arrow.

Now you’ll see more textual emoji that you can scroll down the page to view. Just hit any one that you desire to put into your message.

When you’re done, just hit the globe key to get back to the regular English keyboard.

That’s all there is to it! Have fun! ^_^

Images from original article at Macapper.com. GREAT FIND!

After I got my iPhone 4 set up and had some time to kill, my friend & I tried out FaceTime. It’s pretty damn cool! But say you don’t have any friends available to try out FaceTime (or no friends at all)… What do you do?

Apple sent out an email on Friday informing iPhone 4 owners that they can call Apple and test out FaceTime with them! For free!

All you need to do is to call 1-888-FACETIME from 8:00 am to 8:00 pm CDT and an Apple representative will show you the basics and a few advanced tips. I haven’t tried it yet, but just to see what it’s all about might be worth it. Just remember to need to have wi-fi on.

If you’ve tried calling Apple to try out FaceTime, let us know what happened and what was talked about.

Watch Apple’s New iPhone 4 Promo Video:

So, there it is. The iPhone 4. I won’t bore you with the specs about it (you can find it on Apple’s iPhone site), but here is my take on it:

The iPhone 4 is packed with loads of great features! I was this excited too about the 3GS last year, but now I’m even MORE EXCITED than last year! HA! Just over 2 weeks away until it’s in my hands!

1. Wow, this thing is fast! It’s faster than Flash! (no pun intended)
2. I like these little tab thingies. Very cool.
3. I also like the thumbnails on the home page (what they call Speed Dial).
4. Crap. There are tons of CSS issues and right off the bat, we’ve become enemies.
5. What is that nasty blue border that surrounds links when I click on them?
6. Filling out forms feels so weird. They completely did away with the native UI.
7. Red bar at the top, all the time… annoying.
8. What’s the difference between a bookmark and a saved page?
9. Mobile View? Really, Opera? I’m already on a mobile device.
10. Sigh. Is it just me or is the UI sloppy? Or maybe I’m just used to Apple’s UI perfection.
11. Nothing left to say. Sorry, Opera.

Opera Mini is fast, but it has issues with rendering CSS and I’m not too crazy about the user interface it has. Some things just don’t make much sense as to why it was done in the app. I think Opera Mini still needs a lot of fixing before overpowering Safari from the iPhone. I’m quite happy with Safari for now.

Oh, CNN. When will you get competent people that will make sure they get the correct info? How about double checking your stories before publishing them?

I’d like to thank @majorh for tweeting this out & bringing it to my attention.