I’ll admit, it took me quite some time before I saw the usefulness of Twitter. I’ve had an account for quite awhile, however, I never really used it. Now I’m starting to see more and more uses for it, and since I spend a lot of time away from my computer, I decided that I was going to need an app on my iPhone that would let me manage all of my Twitter accounts with ease. After trying and testing just about every Twitter app out there for the iPhone, I’ve narrowed my list to 3. Keep in mind that I’m only reviewing applicatoins that allow for the management of multiple accounts. There are many great Twitter apps out there that allow for the management of only one account, but I need an app that will manage multiple accounts. I’ll share my personal favorite at the end.
TweetDeck
This app is great primarily due to the fact that it provides a familiar interface to that of its Mac/PC application counterpart. It is packed full of features, many of which I am probably still unaware of. TweetDeck has been the favorite desktop application of many big bloggers and other online personalities, so it figures that the iPhone app would be one of the top Twitter apps for iPhone. Some of the features that I like are:
- The ability to update multiple accounts with the same tweet
- URL shortening built in
- Ability to post pictures and location
- Sideways keyboard
- Custom pages
- Sync with TweetDeck account
Features and things that I don’t like about TweetDeck:
- You need to setup the “columns” that you want to display for each account, I’d like it to setup main columns automatically and give you the opportunity to add/remove from those defaults.
- Over-complicated. There seems to be too much going on. The interface is very busy.
EchoFon
Believe it or not ,the way that I found EchoFon was by following Chad OchoCinco (@OGOchoCinco). He has some crazy tweets, and doesn’t seem to care that he sounds like an idiot in half of them. Anyways, EchoFon has two versions, free and pro. Free lets you use one account, Pro lets you use multiple accounts. The features that I like about EchoFon are:
- Clean, easy, familiar layout – Apple should be proud
- Concise navigation, gives you what you need and no more – doesn’t overcomplicate
- Direct messages display as Apples text message style with the to/from bubbles – not necessary, but a cool feature
Things that I don’t like about EchoFon:
- The $4.99 price tag for the pro versoin
- Nothing else really, this is a very well done app
HootSuite
This is another great multi-account managing app. Like EchoFon, it will cost you, however, this one is regularly $2.99, currently on sale at the time of this writing for $1.99. In addition to managing multiple Twitter accounts, HootSuite will also allow you to manage Facebook accounts and Fan Pages, LinkedIn accounts and Ping.fm accounts (online – ability to manage non-Twitter accounts hasn’t been added to the HootSuite iPhone app yet). HootSuite is really a one-stop-shop for all things social. Here are the key features that I like about HootSuite:
- Multi-account management
- Multi-platform management (Online only)
- Integration with HootSuite.com account
- Schedulte Tweets – great feature, especially for when you’re going out of town or on vacation
- Organization of Accounts, and tabs/pages – HootSuite starts each account with default pages: Home Feed, Direct Messages, Mentions, Pending Tweets, Sent Tweets. You can then modify these lists by adding to them or removing from them.
Things that I don’t like about HootSuite:
- I can’t find a good version of the HootSuite iPhone app logo online.
- Nothing yet.
All in all, the 3 apps that I reviewed all have their benefits. At the end of the day, I think it all comes down to personal preference, but my favorite Twitter app for the iPhone is HootSuite, with EchoFon coming in a close second. If you have another app that you like better than any of the 3 that I mentioned here, I’d love to hear it!
Apple has just released an update to iPhoto, version 7.1.5 which according to the Apple website, “…improves the printing quality of books, cards and calendars ordered via the iPhoto printing service.” A similar update for Aperture was released about a week prior to the iPhoto 7.1.5 update.
As a PC convert, I was an avid Picasa user. Picasa is Google’s own photo management tool that does a great job organizing and managing files, and it also has a lot of editing options built into it. Picasa’s ability to handle and manage a large amount of images while maintaining its speed is unparalled, and I can only imaging that it would be even more impressive on the Apple OS X operating system. I have 10’s of thousands of images in my Picasa library on my PC and Picasa works without a hitch. It’s never even crashed on me… It works like software should.
First and foremost comes unproductivity. That’s why Adium is on this list. Adium is a full featured chat program/instant messaging client that can be used to connect to all of the most popular platforms: AIM, MSN Messenger, Jabber, GTalk, Yahoo!, Facebook, MySpace IM, ICQ, Mobile Me, and more. Adium is easy to configure, has more options than you can dream of, and just works great.
Now if you’re looking for an office suite and don’t want to fork out the $349 to pickup a copy of Microsoft Office for Mac, you’re in luck because NeoOffice allows you to open/edit/save all of the popular Microsoft Office file formats. Not only that, but it is based off of the OpenOffice suite, but extended with OSX features and functionality. A must have!
One program/application that will be a familiar item for many PC users will be FireFox. Still known as one of the best web browsers, FireFox is hard to beat with its speed and ease of use. The ability to install add-ons has made FireFox the leader of the browser war, and it functions just as good as any other browser on the Mac.
QuickTime is great for MOV files, but when you need a media player that will play other video formats, VLC Media Player is a great place to start. VLC Media Player is a simple, no frills player. It has a clean interface and is simple and easy to use.
