Twitter is what you make of it. A service that has been largely community driven, Twitter’s free API access means developers can create some truly unique ways of interacting with it. Here’s one that’s quite old, but I don’t think has got the attention it deserves. Reportage, by WhereCloud.

Reportage is a client like no other. Instead of having to deal with one linear timeline, Reportage’s approach is following one person at a time. You do this by ‘tuning in’ to each account, largely recognizing them by their avatar, using its gorgeous pseudo radio tuner user interface. By the sound of it, the approach seems totally absurd, something that’s set to fail. Using it however is a whole new experience.

I’ve so far followed what the SA team members have been saying by looking through the SA twitter feed—which follows all current writers. However, it doesn’t show me their replies, and conversations are also cut off. With Reportage, I can see a feed of who @brandonpittman has been talking to, and if I’m following those people he’s been talking to, their replies, in one cohesive list. Another use case, for me at least, is following news sites. I’ve given up on RSS as a source of news, using it as just a way to catch up on the week’s happenings. Twitter on the other hand keeps me updated with the current news. With reportage, I have a bunch of techie feeds like Ars Technica, MacRumors et al, and I can see through them if if I’ve missed anything. If I need to read an article, hit the Instapaper button—I’ve switched from Read it Later back to Instapaper—and it’s saved for future reading. This way I don’t even have to be following a lot of these feeds, since you can load users that are outside of your following list.

That was about the accounts you’ve marked. But there’s a general ‘Timeline-esque’ view as well—the world view. This will pull any recent tweets from your timeline, or those who have mentioned you, and group them into one avatar/icon for each user. So instead of seeing my entire timeline at one go, I get to see @kyleve’s tweets first, then @teucher’s, and so on. If @Teucher and @kyleve have had a conversation during this timeframe, both their tweets will show in each other’s feeds—that is, everything that’s relevant to that user, but only from what’s happening in my twitter feed. I hope I’m explaining it right. I’m get to get comfortable with this workflow though. It’s a little too much to handle for those following over 200 people since there’ll be a lot more to ‘tune in’ to. Luckily there’s a ‘mute’ button, so if you don’t care about a certain chunk of people, you can turn them off. Oh, and did I mention you can send out tweets from the app as well?

Reportage does have its drawbacks however. First is it’s not very good at caching. Either it’s buggy, or it’s just not meant to cache. So if it has downloaded its set quota of tweets, it won’t automatically fetch tweets from those accounts I’ve marked. So if Ars Technica doesn’t get its tweets in, I have to manually load them in. It doesn’t have threaded conversations, so you can’t follow conversations that involve people you don’t follow. There’s no offline mode, so if the app doesn’t register an internet connection on launch, it automatically quits. It also doesn’t have support for modern things like lists (or even have its own version of grouping multiple accounts). No twitter searches either, so it can’t be used for tracking your business. Instead it wastes space on ‘local tweets’ and personal timeline.

Overall, it’s hard to recommend Reportage to everyone. It certainly doesn’t replace Tweetie as your standalone twitter app, nor does it supplement a business oriented app. I like it though. I really like it. Like I’ve been launching it every day (though not many days have passed). It’s got a really slick user interface, good looking list and profile views, and lets me sit back and catch up on what’s important. That’s what it’s about. It’s about cutting out the noise, sitting back and enjoying tweets. Following your favourite people with added enthusiasm rather than having to filter out their tweets from everything else. Perhaps you might want to do the same—perhaps I should be recommending it to everyone. That’ll be a very confused $1.99 at the App Store.

[Update: If you do get the app, remember to uncheck the “Follow @reportage” while giving out your username and password at the welcome screen. Sneaky.]

MacBuzzer discount hub launched →

It’s not a bundle, but a place to get discounts on applications. Nothing worth writing home about at the moment, but you do get the excellent Rucksack app (unachiver) for free.

iPad, in all its glory →

As Apple started accepting Pre-orders for its magical and revolutionary device, the features page also got updated. Some surprises:

1. Safari has a thumbnail grid view for pages.
2. The iBooks app will accept any books in the ePub format. Sync them via iTunes.
3. There’s no ‘Dashboard view’ replacing Spotlight. It’s still wasted on one gigantic list of skewed results.
4. Still no mention of iTunes LP in the iPod app.
5. There’s a physical Screen rotation lock button, so you don’t have to suffer reading in awkward positions.
6. [Update, via Macworld] The iPad supports AVI videos, with a data rate of up to 35mbps.

Fontcase 1.5, now with auto activation →

Seems like Pieter Omvlee has just shipped the ultimate font manager on the Mac. I haven’t had a chance to test the auto-activation feature—the app kept crashing on launch—but I’m sure mine’s an isolated case.

Familiar + satisfying + fun vs. limiting + illegible + awkward →

Neven Mrgan’s response to Marco Arment’s piece on Apple overdoing the interface metaphor. Mrgan wins.

The App Store is humongous today and works like the perfect compliment for the iPhone. There is enough good (and stupid) content on the store today for one to spend hours exploring. One of the most popular kind of apps on the App Store have been games. The spectacular hardware of the iPhone combined with the ease of the App Store has enabled game developers to push the boundaries of creativity and innovation, to come out with some brilliant game titles we see in the store today. On the App Store, it’s not only about how good a game looks or how amazing the graphics are. What also works on the App Store are games with innovative gameplay. Some of the most popular game titles on the App Store today are simple games created by an independent developers with innovative gameplay.

I’m no fan of games with “oh-so-awesome-graphics”. Sure, I’ve bought Real Racing, Need For Speed: Underground, Need For Speed: Shift and even Eliminate. But these are not games that I play for hours together. What works for me (and many others, I’ve seen) are games that you play anytime, anywhere. Games that you can play when you’re in a long queue, when you’re in a in a boring seminar with a room fool of people dozing off, when you’re bored to your wits lying on the couch or even when “on the pot”. There have been amazing such titles to the hit the App Store. First¹, there was FlightControl. Then came along Fare City, followed by Scoops, Sneezies, Draw Race, Fling, Frenzic, iShoot, Lexic, Moondrop, Paper Toss, Warships, Words with Friends and recently, Charadium. The latest game to have swept me away is Cosmo Kid.

Cosmo Kid

Cosmo Kid is a very recent addition to the App Store, having only been released on 25th last month. The game is loosely based around the idea of making controlled modifications to the game environment, so that the game’s central character can go higher up the vertical space - pretty much like Papi Jump, Scoops and Doodle Jump. The official story line of the game is:

Cosmo Kid wants to spread galactic goodness around the entire cosmos and it’s your job to help him. By drawing elastic bands with your digits, you’ll bounce him up to space and across the universe.

On your journey you’ll meet intergalactic flowers, grab a meaty treat on the Hotdog Planet, bounce your way through a giant human body and visit the narwhals on Sea Planet.

The game involves drawing small bands of rubber with your fingers on which the character of the game - Cosmo Kid can bounce on, enabling him to rise higher and explore the universe. The gameplay is very simple in nature, but surprisingly exciting and very difficult to keep up with. Along the way, there are different elements (or “happy, intergalactic flower folks” called Kukkajas) that Cosmo Kid keeps bumping into. Depending on the nature of these Kukkajas, Cosmo Kid may either earn points or just bang into and bounce off them. The higher into the space you go, the more points (in metres) you get.

Unlike Doodle Jump, Cosmo Kid will bounce off the edges of the screen. This makes it difficult to keep a track of his flight path, as a steep degree of bounce and you’ll never realize when he bounced off the wall and dropped down. To make the gameplay more exciting, as you go higher into the space, different theme styles and new elements are introduced. What’s more, the higher you go, the better the chances are of getting top-ups. You have to keep drawing the elastic bands, as only one band can be active on the screen.

There is an integrated scoreboard that can be sorted as Global / Country and Personal. The developers have also integrated Twitter and Facebook publishing into the game, so you can boast your scores on your favorite social network too.

Available on the App Store for just $0.99, Cosmo Kid is the new kid on the block that brings continuous hours of fun and addiction to your iPhone, an app that you can get easily addicted too and hard to keep yourself away from.

Giveaway

The developers have given us 5 Promo codes to give away. Winning one is easy. Just leave a comment telling us if you were left alone in space and were allowed to make one phone call, who would you call? Standard giveaway rules apply.

Beautiful iPhone app Fridge Magnets →

Just $13 for the whole set. I’m definitely getting one. [via Gizmodo]

So what’s the best task manager on the iPhone then? We’ve reviewed so many if them (most of which we don’t even write about), and developers are showing no signs of slowing down. It’s hard to decide which one’s the best, even in the same category. Each of these offer some great new ways to interact with and manage your tasks, and there’s more showing up every day. Managing tasks would require a stable platform, something you’re comfortable with, something that’s permanent. Using ten different applications over the span of a few months is not nearly as idea. I’ve stuck to using Things for over two years now. I do exclusively use other task managers while reviewing them, but for I quickly come trotting back to Things. Things isn’t what my ideal task manager is though, and looking through the app store, none of them are. I’m hoping putting it down in words will help me understand what it is I want.

Ideally, a great task manager should make access to your tasks ubiquitous. Whether you have your iPhone, or your Mac, or are stuck using a Windows PC with an internet connection, your tasks should be accessible. What I’m searching for, is the Simplenote of task managers. Unfortunately, none of these offer that at the moment; at least not with a decent user interface and workflow. I had laid my hopes on MobileMe, but Apple has so far shown no interest in improving what they introduced two years ago. It’s a shame really, they really had something going.

One of the task managers which moves your tasks around—albeit using third party backend— is TouchTodo. It syncs with Google Calendar, which in turn can be made to sync with iCal on your Mac, as well as the Calendar app on your iPhone. The sync is seamless, and you have access to tasks everywhere—even offline push alerts on your iPhone using the built in Calendar app. The problem with this however, is since they’re using a web service they can’t control, it leads to a lot of quirky behaviour. You can create projects within the app, but they aren’t synced as such with the web. If you don’t add a due date, it doesn’t sync. Besides each application in this loop looks different and feeds different from the other, leading to a less than optimal experience.

Things offers Wifi sync, but no over-the-air sync so if you forgot to sync up in the morning, you don’t have your latest data with you. OmniFocus can in addition to Wifi, sync using MobileMe or a WebDAV server, but no access from the browser. It’s fine for most users who don’t absolutely need to have tasks in the browser, but that shouldn’t be the case. There are times when you’re stuck using a PC or someone else’s Mac, and the browser is the only thing that’s constant across any platform. Cultured Code is working on over-the-air sync for Things, and I suspect they’re taking this long because they’re busy building a Things web application + backend service with push notifications, social network integration, cool-new-features-I-haven’t-thought-of; I could be way wrong. Remember the Milk is one popular service that offers a great web and iPhone experience, but nothing on the desktop—you have to make do with Fluid web app (I could be wrong on this). Again, most users are most comfortable with this varied functionality, and for good reason; they’re very good apps. But not good enough.

Then there’s TaskPaper with SimpleText backend, which offers iPhone, desktop, and web access, all based on a very open file format—plaintext. The SimpleText folder is open for any application to take advantage on the Mac, so you can even have your tasks edited using Notational Velocity instead of using TaskPaper. There is however no API access I’m aware of even public API access that allows other developers to pull that data into their own apps. I don’t think it’s ready yet, but if there’s a task manager headed in the right direction, it’s TaskPaper with SimpleText.ws integration.

Mostly, it’s these data islands like 2Do, Dunnit, Today Todo (and so many others) that I’m not so enthused about. On the one hand they’re simple, meant for small ad-hoc lists, sport great innovative user interfaces with some neat features. It’s hard not to recommend polished apps, really. But on the other hand, your data is locked into this one application on this one device. You can’t move to a different application without manually re-entering all those tasks. That they don’t sync with the cloud is a fact that will soon bite a lot of these apps. Yes, I’m talking about the iPad. Imagine trying to use one of these data islands on both the iPhone and iPad. Even Wifi-sync using the Mac as middle ground will feel clunky and primitive. I know Gruber and Friends don’t like the word ‘cloud’, but that’s exactly what this workflow should feel like. A backend service that you don’t have to deal with, while your data is moved across wirelessly across devices. This has been perfectly executed by Simplenote and Notational Velocity. Your data is local, belongs to you, and can be backed up however you wish, yet it’s available wherever you go.

I still haven’t found the perfect task manager, and am sticking to Things and my whiteboard for now. TaskPaper looks good, and I can see myself switching over soon. While I have done a lot of searching and testing, it’s very well possible I’ve missed out on something perfect. I’m hoping you’ll educate me if you knew about it.