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!

As with most of you, the blogging platform is the most important part of your blog, in my case, that platform is Wordpress. Without our blogging platform, we’d have no blogs. There are 10’s if not hundreds of blogging platforms out there, it is more or less just a matter of choosing one that you like. I’ve chosen Wordpress for two primary reasons:

1. Wordpress is a free software, and very powerful. It does what it says it does.
2. Wordpress is community driven. This is probably the best feature because it means for hundreds of thousands of available themes and plugins, and the Wordpress platform itself is updated constantly.

Initially, my primary method of publishing posts to my blog was through the built in Wordpress web admin system, but as I became a more “seasoned blogger”, I began using local tools that would allow me to write and save posts to my local machine prior to publishing them to my blog. The first tool that I began using was on a PC, and it was offered by Microsoft – it was called Windows Live Writer. This tool was great and really introduced me to the idea of “offline blogging”. Since converting to a Mac, I’ve found a comparable software that makes offline blogging an absolute breeze. That program is called ecto and it is actually available for both Windows and OSX users.

Adium

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.

NeoOffice

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!

FireFox

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.

VLC Media Player

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.

If you have any comments, suggestions or recommendations, please leave a comment as I’m still new to the Mac and would love to hear what any of you seasoned veterans prefer to use.