Category: Software

Would you buy a show on iTunes that you could stream at any time to YouTube? The way that most people answer that question could be crucial to the fortunes of both Apple and Google in the coming months. Google is apparently following up on its plan to offer streamed movie releases for rent with another to do essentially the same thing for current television shows.

As Ryan at NewTeeVee reports, Google is in the process of convincing the TV industry to allow it to stream the kind of new, copyright-protected content that now gets pulled down for a reasonable fee, say multiple sources close to the issue.

Streaming vs. Downloading

The idea would be to do what iTunes already does, which is offer commercial-free first-run TV shows to users for the price of around $1.99 per episode, on or around the first day of their airing. The difference, of course, would be that unlike Amazon and Apple’s download-and-watch services, YouTube would be sticking to its existing streaming video formula, so users couldn’t keep the files on their computers for later viewing. There’s no official word on whether or not users would be able to go back and stream shows after the initial viewing, but I doubt TV content providers would agree to such terms.

YouTube execs think that isn’t necessarily a game-ender, but they acknowledge that it is a problem:

Executives at YouTube and TV insist that the disparity is simply a perception problem and cite studies showing that most people who download TV episodes only watch them once, anyway. But that’s a tough sell.

I know I’d rather have something I can store and potentially rewatch, even if I never actually do. A lifetime subscription arrangement might make me more comfortable, but the opportunities for misuse on the consumer side are too great for the television industry to take that risk.

YouTube Mobile Support

The key factor in whether or not YouTube’s TV efforts will be successful, though, lies not with the way it delivers the content, but the places it delivers said content to. YouTube is accessible on any number of platforms and devices, including computers, Blu-Ray players, video game consoles, televisions, and cell phones.

If mobile content usage trends are any indication, the last delivery route will be the most significant going forward. If YouTube TV rentals extend to YouTube’s mobile apps on Android and iPhone devices, I foresee users more than willing to accept the trade-off of not having any downloaded content in exchange for quick and easy instant accessibility anywhere they have a data connection.

In case you didn’t realize it, listening to voicemail is a colossal waste of time. Humans read much faster than they can listen, so AT&T’s entry into the Voicemail to Text field is welcome, but it’s a bit late to the party. Other services have been quietly providing this for years; some less expensive and some more expensive.

PhoneTag

Personally, I’ve been a PhoneTag (formerly Simulscribe) subscriber since June 2007 and love the service. PhoneTag replaces your carrier’s voicemail service with its own. PhoneTag will text and/or email you a transcription of your phone messages along with optionally attaching an electronic copy of the voicemail in a variety of formats.

iPhone users who use PhoneTag will lose the ability to use AT&T’s Visual Voicemail, since PhoneTag supersedes the built-in voicemail. Because I can read all my voicemails via email and text, I don’t really mind not having Visual Voicemail.

PhoneTag costs $30 a month (free 1 week trial and other pricing plans available) for unlimited transcriptions and you can forward any number of phones to their service for transcription and the transcriptions go to any number of phones you specify. For example, I have multiple phone numbers for my business and they all forward to that same unified voicemail. When I’m out of town or otherwise inaccessible, the transcriptions go to one of my technicians. Best of all, since the voicemails come in as attachments, I can save every voicemail I’ve ever received right to my computer for daily backup. The transcriptions are nearly flawless, especially if you upload your contacts to the system so you can help it recognize proper names.

Google Voice

On the other end of the spectrum is Google’s free Google Voice service. If you can get an invite, the entire service is free and it also provides transcription of voicemails. Similar to PhoneTag, you’ll need to forward your busy or no answer calls to Google’s phone number.

The transcriptions Google Voice provides border on the ridiculous and I found the service too unreliable for serious business use. Forwarding the messages to multiple phones was difficult and archiving the messages to my computer required manual download of each message. PhoneTag was simply a more elegant and scalable solution when compared to Google Voice. However being free, Google Voice makes a great way to find out if a voicemail to text service is right for you.

AT&T’s New Service

AT&T’s new service costs $9.99 per month — priced squarely in the middle between PhoneTag and Google Voice. Nuance, maker of well-known transcription software Dragon Naturally Speaking, provides the transcription services. Because Nuance is a well-known provider of voice to text services, I suspect it will be much better than Google Voice’s option. While I haven’t tried the service, AT&T claims you can still use your existing voicemail system and similar to PhoneTag and GoogleVoice, makes it easy to archive old messages. Obviously, the service will only work with your AT&T phone.

I’ll stick with PhoneTag due to the quality of its transcriptions and the flexbility of working with multiple phone systems. AT&T’s service is an attractive option for those that don’t need all of PhoneTag’s features.

Now iPhone customers have three options in three different price ranges to avoid listening to voicemail messages and get “true” visual voicemail; voicemails they can read and see without putting their phone up to their ear.

Why are you still actually listening to your voicemails?

When Apple revealed its documents and templates detailing the process of creating iTunes LP and Extras for small studios and indie artists to take advantage of, it also noted that for the time being, submission would be manual, but that automated electronic submission was on its way. A new report suggests the vehicle of delivery for that submission could be none other than Apple’s own iDVD media authoring program, part of the iLife suite.

The new ability would be part of a major update to the program, which in turn would be one of a series of updates planned across the iLife catalog for the 2010 version of the software bundle. iDVD hasn’t had a significant refresh in quite a while, and honestly, even the title of the application shows its age. Perhaps a rename will be in order as it transitions to a means of digital publication.

Boy Genius Report is the source of the rumors about the transition for Apple’s standby DVD authoring program:

We’ve been informed that Apple plans to completely redo their iDVD application (in addition to others in iLife 2010), and besides iDVD not being refreshed in a pretty long time, one of the reasons appears to be the inclusion of iTunes LP creation. This will allow artists (indie and major) to create a custom iTunes LP and submit it directly to Apple right from the new application that will be a part of iLife 2010.

BGR goes on to say that the rumor, while unconfirmed, comes from an industry source that has been fairly reliable in past instances, though it doesn’t cite any specific examples. The Report itself has a fairly good track record regarding Apple-related rumors, and this one in particular isn’t that far-fetched or hard to believe.

There’s still no word on a time line for the release of iLife ‘10, but if past practice is any indication, pricing for an upgrade for existing ‘09 users will be somewhere around the $79 mark — which is not a very high barrier of entry for access to iTunes LP authoring and creation tools, meaning that anyone who can get their music in the iTunes Store should be able to create enhanced content. It’s a win-win, since Apple gets to flesh out its enhanced content library, and artists get to expand their oeuvre and provide more incentive to paying customers.

No word yet on whether iTunes Extras authoring and submission will also be included. Considering that iDVD was designed at least partially with home movie DVD enhancement in mind, I’d say there’s a very strong possibility we’ll see Extras support, too.

Google’s Chrome browser is fast, small, and “nearly” perfect. Using the same Webkit rendering engine as Safari, and its own custom V8 javascript engine, Chrome has been blowing away the competition on Windows for over a year. Google is finally nearing a release for the Mac, but since the browser is open source, you can get almost everything from Chrome in the Chromium Nightlies. These builds are separate from the official Google Chrome developers preview, they are in-development versions of Chrome, and are updated almost every night.

I’ve been using the Chromium builds off and on for months, and have recently switched back to it as my primary browser. Chromium reminds me of when Firefox first spun off of Mozilla. It was then, as Chromium is now, small, bare-bones, devoid of feature bloat, and fast.

Unfortunately. the Nightlies are not the easiest thing in the world to find, and Chromium doesn’t update itself when a new build is available. So, I used a little Automator and shell script action to build this tiny app that will download the latest version of Chromium to your Downloads folder. If you’ve got Growl installed it will also send Growl an alert that it is finished, but that’s it. That’s all it does, very simple, nothing fancy.

You can download the “ChromeUp” Automator application here (45kb, ZIP).

If there’s one thing you can count on about Apple’s App Store review policy, it’s that the process will be consistently inconsistent. Today, an app launches that was originally rejected for known and acknowledged use of private APIs, despite the fact that developers haven’t modified the app in any way since its rejection.

Knocking Live Video, the app in question, makes use of Apple’s forbidden private APIs to enable live video streaming over Wi-Fi and 3G for the first time on the platform. Apple has made clear its policy on the use of private APIs, most recently via the introduction of an automated layer of the review process for app submissions that automatically checks all code for the presence of unauthorized API usage.

Knocking’s usage of live streaming video is very particular, as Ars Technica explains, something which may have had something to do with it being approved while other apps like Qik haven’t been able to break down the streaming wall:

Knocking Live Video uses an interesting take on streaming video. Unlike Qik, which is designed to stream video to multiple clients, Knocking streams from one iPhone to another. (…) You simply launch the app and “knock” another iPhone user with Knocking Live Video installed. That user will receive the “knock” via push notification. Once answered, you can then stream live video directly to them. An iPhone 3GS or iPhone 3G is required to transmit video, but other iPhones and iPod touches can receive and view the stream via WiFi.

The app was initially rejected about a month ago for unauthorized use of the private APIs, but Knocking development Brian Meehan decided not to just take the refusal lying down. Instead, he went straight to the top, contacting Steve Jobs directly via email. Jobs has been known to actually respond to emails personally on occasion, so it was at least worth a shot. Meehan’s plea was not about self-interest, but instead focused on appealing to Jobs as a lifelong Apple user who wanted to create a better experience for other members of the community.

The Monday following Meehan’s email, which was sent on a Saturday night in late November, he was contacted by an unnamed Apple executive who informed him that the app’s rejection had been reversed, and that the decision to allow it into the App Store had come “directly from the top.” It is now available for free in the App Store.

Hopefully this means that Apple is at least considering expanding the pool of publicly available APIs. Access to the live streaming video API would allow a lot of applications that have been shelved to see the light of day. It proves one thing at least: Apple is listening to the iPhone development community, even though it may not always appear that way.

Recently, my boss at my day job was considering getting a Mac and asked that fateful question: So, what about games?

A few years ago, any response to that question would have been met with an awkward silence and an embarrassed look and a rush to change the subject to the weather. Now a days, thankfully, the answer is: Not that bad, actually. The switch to Intel processors, along with TransGaming’s Cider, has allowed companies to port their games to OS X.

The bad news is, almost all the games on this list require a Mac with an Intel-based processor to run, and most of them either do not work on the old GMA 950 chip, or are severely limited.

Massively Multiplayer Online Games

I’ve got a weak spot for these enormous time sinks. They do come with a not-so-hidden cost of a monthly subscription fee and potential dirty looks from your spouse as you’re up until 3am trying go get “just one more level.”

Warhammer Online
Derived from the old Warhammer miniatures war games, we’ve covered this one previously. It’s still a good choice for someone who also likes bashing their fellow man in the face as well as computer-controlled monsters. You can download the endless trial, which will let you play a portion of the game for free, or you can also buy the retail Windows version for about $20 — you don’t need to install it, and the Mac version isn’t on the disc, but you can use the account key to create the account and then download the Mac client.

Eve Online
A space-themed MMO where you pilot your own ship is a nice distraction from the chicks-in-chainmail you find in fantasy games — really, that bikini has a high armor rating?  Riiiiiight. While my experiences with Eve are limited, from what friends have told me, “once you get over the learning curve, it’s quite fun.” So, if you’re tired of burly elves and svelte dwarves (or is it the other way around?), Eve Online might be worth a look. As with Warhammer, you can either download it online or pick up a box set at a retailer.

World of Warcraft
It’s hard to mention a gaming roundup without talking about the 800 pound gorilla of the gaming market. Recently celebrating its fifth anniversary and over 11 million subscribers, WoW shows no indication of slowing down this decade. Blizzard has always been a staunch supporter of the Mac, and the box you buy at the store will have the Mac installers on the disc. There’s even a handy iPhone app you can view your character and guild info with.

Shooters

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
In a break from the World War 2 theme of the earlier Call of Duty game, as you’d assume from the title, this one is set in the modern era. The single-player campaign is one of the best I’ve ever experienced — I’ve got a fairly low finish rate on games, and this once was interesting all the way to the end. You’ll play the part of two soldiers in different areas of the world (A British SAS trooper and an American marine) working on two plot lines. I found the level design varied and well-paced — each level felt bereft of the usual “padding” developers add to the game to make it longer. At around 12 hours long, the campaign is relatively short, but, frankly, I’d rather most games be this short and well done than inflated.

Bioshock
Yeah, I know, like Call of Duty 4, it came out a few years ago for consoles and PCs. This Art Deco themed shooter answers the question: What would happen if Ayn Rand built an underwater complex based on her Objectivist theories? Naturally, something goes wrong and you get to unravel it. As with Call of Duty 4, Bioshock is one of the few games that compelled me to finish it, and is one of the few games so scary it caused the hair on my arms to stand up.

Sim Games

Sims 3
It’s hard to ignore the siren’s call of a game that lets you block off the bathroom and watch your Sims go mad. The Sims franchise is a guilty pleasure of mine. Apparently I’m not so busy micromanaging my own life, I need to micromanage a Sim’s virtual life, too. The Sims 3 has a few new features, like careers. Previously, when your Sim went to work, he or she disappeared into a black hole from which money spouted. Now, they can advance up a career path. I just wish they’d learn to use the bathroom at work.

X-Plane
Back in my PC gaming days, I was a huge fan of Microsoft’s Flight Simulator series. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s shuttering of that development group killed the program — not that we’d have seen a Mac version. X-Plane seems to be the Mac equivalent of it. I’ve yet to play it, and, sadly, any attempt at downloading the demo has failed. You can get it at the Apple store but the online store claims a 2-3 week shipping time.

Strategy Games

Civ 4
The Civilization series has been a long staple in the strategy era, and Civ 4 is one of my favorites. Civ 4 adds a few new features over previous versions: religion is much more important, you can promote units, and now you can see your overall score. There is also a slimmed down iPhone version.

Whimsical

Lego Series
If there’s something more fun than a Lego adaptation of Star Wars or Indiana Jones, I don’t know what it is. I love how they are both true to the source material, yet light-hearted. These are fun for the whole family.

Peggle
Part pinball, part blockout, part crazy, the idea behind Peggle is to eliminate the orange pegs. You are given 10 balls to complete this task. If the ball lands in the scoop at the bottom, you get a free ball. Most of my experience has been with the iPhone app, but I’ve been loving it.

Any sort of a roundup like this is heavily biased on the author’s tastes: in my case, it’s apparent I like MMOs, shooters, and strategy games. Now it’s your turn: What games would you like to give or receive this holiday season?

As our sister site GigaOM reports, video calling has indeed arrived on the iPhone. It’s just a little one-way, is all. A new version of Fring supports video calls made using both its own and the Skype network, but you’re only able to receive video, not transmit it, since the camera on the iPhone 3GS still resides on the side of the phone opposite the screen.

So long as you have iPhone OS 3.0 installed on your iPhone, you should be able to receive video calls with Fring from desktop and certain Nokia phone users once you install the update. As with everything cool on the iPhone, you’ll have to have a Wi-Fi connection to use video calling features, just as you must to make and receive voice calls, too. This despite AT&T’s announcement that it would allow VOIP on its network.

Video calling works as advertised, but I’ll warn you that it can be an unnerving experience to talk to someone who can’t see you, but who you can see, for all parties involved. You can even initiate video calls from the iPhone, but obviously doing so still won’t enable video services on your end.

It’s a neat trick, and handy if you’re on the road and haven’t seen a loved one for quite a while, but until Apple gets wise to this trend (if it is one; some think video calling will never catch on in the mainstream), I’ll be placing my iPhone Skype calls the old-fashioned way, to avoid the accompanying feeling of slightly creepy voyeurism that comes with watching without being watched. The video below will help you fathom the system if you’re not interested or able to give it a go yourself.

If you’re looking for a solution that keeps track of various social networks at once, all in one centralized location, EventBox for the Mac was a nice beta program that did the trick. EventBox is no more, but the program still exists. It’s changed names and become Socialite (much more appropriate if you ask me), and come out of beta, too.

I downloaded the demo of the 1.0 release and ran it through its paces. The demo lets you have all the functionality of the full version, but you’re limited to running three different services or accounts. Which, honestly, isn’t much of a limitation for many users, myself included.

All Your Services, One Place

Socialite covers all the major bases, including Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. That would be enough for me, but it also will log you into Digg and Google Reader, or let you track RSS feeds yourself manually. For many people I know, opening Socialite first thing in the morning would clear their to-do list for the day.

Facebook integration lets you access status updates and photo albums, both yours and those of your friends. You can upload photos and update your status, but inbox access is still not a part of the deal, until Facebook opens that up to the API. Twitter gives you access to your timeline, mentions, and direct messages, and allows you to view your lists and lists you subscribe to. You can’t create new lists or modify them in this version of Socialite. Flickr includes contacts photos, but also Interestingness, which is one of my favorite parts of Flickr, so I’m glad it’s included.

Many Features, One Simple UI

None of these services share the same UI in their native formats. That’s why Socialite’s interface is so impressive. It manages to make the process of working with multiple services in the same shell incredibly intuitive and relatively painless. Well-designed icons, and consistent function placement across the board help make this happen.

Best of all, if you’d rather just deal with things as one big mess, you can work with updates from all your services at once in the macro view “Unread” menu, and all of the appropriate actions for each separate service still appears in the options section for each. And clicking on any update automatically brings up the quick input field related to that service.

Jack of All Trades, Master of None?

Socialite is a great program, and well designed, but it can’t take the place of Tweetie on my Mac. The problem is that since starting to use Twitter, I’ve become less and less dependent on other social networks I belong to. Facebook I can check twice a day really, if I feel like it, and Flickr is something I never really used to begin with. No matter how well Socialite does Twitter, Tweetie still does it better, and with a much smaller memory footprint.

Still, if you like to frequent many social sites, and especially if you’re a Google Reader user, Socialite could be the perfect program to help keep things organized and nicely aggregated in one convenient location.

It has been a long time coming. Google’s Chrome web browser has been available on Windows for over a year, while Mac users have been left with three options — take their chances with a nightly build of the open-source fork of Chrome (dubbed Chromium), use Google’s developer release, or wait for an official Google release.

TechCrunch’s MG Siegler reported yesterday that Chrome for Mac is just a handful of bugs away from a release — specifically, seven bugs, in case you’re counting. But in order to reach their end-of-year deadline for release, the code-jockeys at Google had to do a bit of a hatchet-job on the Mac version of their browser.

So far, Siegler says, all signs point to the exclusion of the Bookmark Manager, App Mode (which emulates the single-window web app functionality offered by Fluid), Task Manager, Gears, Sync for Mac (for syncing bookmarks across Macs), Multi-touch Gesture support, Full Screen Mode and Extensions.

Mike Pinkerton, Technical Lead for Google Chrome for Mac, was asked by Twitter user @boundlessdreamz “When will extensions work correctly on mac? Is that a blocker?”

Pinkerton replied, “No on extensions for beta. But we’ll get them soon. Must draw the line somewhere.”

If you’re a Safari user, you won’t feel too bad about missing Extensions support. If Safari proves anything, it’s that a fully functional and productive web browser doesn’t need to be chock-full of third-party extensions. Mine has only two; Evernote and 1Password. And I could probably live without the former, if I’m honest.

The lack of Gears comes as no great surprise, either. Google Gears doesn’t work on Snow Leopard anyway, and Google has been uncharacteristically rubbish at communicating why it’s being so slow at fixing it. On this point, Siegler adds, “Apparently, Google plans to push ahead with full HTML5 support rather than rely on Gears, at least on the Mac.”

I wonder what prompted that decision? Timing? Complexity? Or perhaps Gears becomes less desirable in a standards-compliant WebKit-world where functionality, speed and compatibility across multiple devices and multiple form-factors becomes the driving force in browser development.

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know which technology more elegantly supports offline data storage; Gears or HTML5. In any case, Gears’ absence on Snow Leopard is deeply irritating for those of us who want to use GMail offline, or take advantage of drag-and-drop functionality in Google Wave. If Chrome marks the start of a Google-wide migration away from Gears and toward HTML5 (even if only for the Mac), I welcome it.

Also out of the equation (at this stage, anyway) is any mention of 64-bit compatibility. But there is, predictably, nothing surprising about that at all. If, like me, you’ve been pursuing the 64-bit dream, you’ll know how consistently disappointing the experience is — practically no one is building apps with true support for 64-bit OS X — and no, Apple’s home-grown Mail and iCal apps don’t count!

Why Should We Care?

For the last five months I’ve tried various builds of Chromium, which has so far been a bit of a mixed-bag when it comes to little things like performance and stability. Oh wait — did I say those were “little things?” Of course, what I meant to say was “stonking-great major issues.”

To be fair, Chromium shows promise, but it’s still much too “unfinished” to be my primary browser. And in case you were wondering, my primary browser is Safari. No, not because I’m an Apple fanboi, but because it’s stable, it’s lightweight, and it’s not a resource-hog. I used to love Firefox and recommended it to everyone, but I barely use the thing these days. Even with no third-party extensions installed, it takes an age to load and the UI is bafflingly inconsistent with the rest of OS X.

Ultimately, why should we care about Yet Another Browser? Well, just consider how much time you spend in a browser every day. Personally, most of my time is spent in Safari. I regularly have several dozen tabs open, often for days at a time. Most of my work is made up of hours spent reading, researching and writing, and while the latter used to take place in a dedicated word processor, Safari is now so stable and dependable I’ve gradually started doing more and more real-time, “live” writing inside the browser. I never would have taken that risk a year ago, but now I barely give it a thought.

In fact, the browser is such a primary, fundamental element in day-to-day computing that Google has built an entire operating system out of it.

In short, web browsers are big business, and make all the difference in how we perceive, experience and interact with the web. I’m all for a new browser that’s fast and functional and plays well with the websites and services I already use. I’m looking forward to putting Chrome for Mac through its paces — I hope it was worth the wait.

In an unexpected twist in the drawn-out battle between Psystar and Apple, the two companies agreed Monday to a partial settlement that could end the case after 17 months of back-and-forth between them, Computerworld is reporting. Details on the settlement are sparse, but what is known is quite surprising.

The terms of the settlement would see Psystar pay Apple damages, though the amount has not yet been determined. It would also see Apple drop any and all trademark, trade-dress and state law claims, which would effectively eliminate the need for a trial. As a partial settlement, the agreement would not go into effect until Psystar has exhausted all of its appeals before the court.

It’s an interesting deal, because it looks like it wouldn’t necessarily stop Psystar from selling its Mac clones. Instead, the company would be limited to selling its “Open” line of computers without OS X preinstalled, and that responsibility would lie instead with customers. Apparently that’s a compromise Apple is willing to live with, and with good reason, since the Mac maker would have to go after many other clone makers if it wasn’t.

Here are the terms of the deal, as stated in a motion filed Monday by Psystar:

Psystar and Apple today entered into a partial settlement that is embodied in a stipulation that will be filed with the court tomorrow. Psystar has agreed on certain amounts to be awarded as statutory damages on Apple’s copyright claims in exchange for Apple’s agreement not to execute on these awards until all appeals in this matter have been concluded. Moreover, Apple has agreed to voluntarily dismiss all its trademark, trade-dress, and state-law claims. This partial settlement eliminates the need for a trial and reduces the issues before this court to the scope of any permanent injunction on Apple’s copyright claims.

That means that Apple’s permanent injunction, which it filed last week, would still be decided by the court. Psystar moved to have its software, the Rebel EFI program, to be excepted from the injunction. Rebel EFI allows users to install any OS on any hardware, but Psystar maintains that since it is entirely its own product, and is not sold together with any hardware or Mac OS X, it should be exempt from Apple’s motion. Also, Psystar goes onto note that even its customers, should they choose to use Rebel EFI to install OS X on non-authorized hardware, should also be exempt from any legal repercussions:

Psystar’s end users do not engage in commercial use of Mac OS X and their use would qualify as use for “internal purposes” even under the standards articulated by Apple in its summary-judgment briefing.

Hard to vilify this new moderate stance taken by the clone maker, which is probably why Apple seems to have agreed to the terms. Whether or not Rebel EFI will continue to be sold, however, is now up to the courts.

Not one to be outdone by Twittelator Pro’s most recent update, atebits’ latest update for Tweetie 2 (iTunes link) brings implementations of the two newest official Twitter features: Lists and Retweet. As someone who isn’t particularly crazy about the official retweet implementation, I’m not so excited about that, but there’s still a “Quote Tweet” option as well, which lets you do things the old way.

There’s a lot of other new features and improvements, too, including tweet geotagging, spam reporting via the official Twitter API, What the Trend explanation of trending topics, and more. Once again, Tweetie has returned to the top of the heap, in terms of both functionality and UI.

Lists can be created, edited, managed and viewed, all from within Tweetie 2 now. That means if users post links in the “@user/list” format, you’ll be able to just click on it to view said list. Your own list management and creation features are accessible via the ellipsis (…) icon. I still have yet to create any of my own lists, but testing this out with the lists of others, it seemed to be well-implemented.

New video upload and hosting options are also available. You can now select from Posterous, Mobypicture and Vid.ly, in addition to TwitVid and yFrog. Maybe best of all among the UI changes, you can now disable automatic browser rotation, which is a feature every landscape-capable app should have, speaking as someone who often browses lying down in bed or on the couch.

Lots of other smaller changes and a long list of bug fixes are also included as part of the 2.1 update. The update is free for all Tweetie 2 users, but if you haven’t yet made the leap to the newest version, the $2.99 price tag is seeming incredibly reasonable right about now.