/via Andy “$1B is a good deal” Baio.

I did some pretty nutso stuff with that little turtle.

I wonder what he’s been up to.

The biggest two changes are the six awesome new reading fonts and the distraction-free, full-screen reading interface.

I just updated Instapaper for my iPad and iPhone. For free. Marco puts a lot of thought and care into this application and it only costs a few dollars. If you’d like to mark things to read later I suggest grabbing Instapaper.

Side note: I’m hoping to integrate the brand-new-not-even-finished-yet Nilai with Instapaper in a future update. I do not foresee Nilai supporting any other read later services.

First, move older email messages out of your Inbox and into an Archive folder. You should have no trouble doing this. It may take a little while for Mail.app to move all of the messages. If you’re the type of person that has several folders (or Mailboxes) for message categories like family, friends, work, etc. etc. then you may not benefit from this tip. But, if you’re like me, and you leave every single message in your Inbox then you definitely will.

What I’ve done is move every message in my Inbox dated prior to December 1, 2011 into an Archive folder that is locally here on my Mac. This way when I go into my Inbox it is only loading a few months of email. I may do this again in June or wait an entire year if I don’t see much of a slow down. But just doing this has sped up Mail.app a lot.

Second, you could strip the bloat from Mail.app’s Envelope Index. What does this mean? I don’t really know but the layman’s explanation might be this; Mail.app keeps a database and sometimes it gets a little out of control. You can run a few commands via Terminal and it will clean up that mess. Again, do this at your own risk.

Your mileage may vary but with these two tips Mail.app should get just a bit snappier. It has for me.

Tap and hold on an Avatar to quickly Follow, Direct Message, Mute, Add to a List or Report for Spam. #TweetbotTip

— Tweetbot for iPhone (@tweetbot) December 17, 2011

Instapaper ships with a tilt-scrolling feature that, rather than scrolling with your finger on the glass, lets you scroll the article you’re reading by titling the iPad.

I wouldn’t mind seeing other apps with features like these.

One of the distinct features in the Path app is the fly-out menu that allows you to share photos, comments, location, etc. Two developers took it upon themselves to build out that menu both in CSS3 and using CoreAnimation. Both open sourced their work and gave credit.

• Path menu in pure CSS 3 by Victor Coulon.
• Path menu using CoreAnimation by ??? (Levy)

/via Mike Rundle on Twitter.

Here is a good look at their application from Geoff Teehan. Or, you can stop by their site and grab a copy for yourself.

/tip Mike Rundle on Twitter for Teehan’s review.

/tip Kyle Slattery.

This is excellent.

/via John Gruber.

My theory; Shaun has a twin and we’ve been fooled for years.

Although I wish the app supported Markdown format (rather than just HTML) I’ll take it.

Just in time for our trip to Ireland too.

Update: A small, yet very welcomed update, is that the Posts tab is now the default tab rather than the Comments tab. This makes things so much quicker. Again, a very, very nice update to WordPress for iOS.

To swaps the events viewer and project stage simply click on Window > Swap Events and Projects. I never knew it was there. Hope this helps!

You’ll need to freshen up that beverage before you sink your teeth into this article. If you don’t have time now I suggest using Instapaper to save it for later.

/via Justin Blanton.

Calling it a launcher application is sort of limiting. Alfred can help you play music, give you quick access to your clipboard’s history, and even help you attach files to your emails. Its absolutely great and version 0.9 is packed to the gills with new features and updates.

This is what would happen. I’d envoke the Miniplayer by first envoking Alfred’s global keyboard shortcut, typing iTunes, and selecting the Miniplayer. Then, I’d choose one of the menu items it shows – here is an example screenshot.

This wasn’t good because the menu changes as you choose items from the list. Notice the keyboard shortcuts to play random albums or switch into Playlists, etc using CMD+2, CMD+3 and so on. The problem is that these menu items change as your context changes inside of the Miniplayer. In other words, CMD+4 would not always fire the same action. This got pretty annoying so I fired off a tweet to @alfredapp on Twitter.

And, wouldn’t you know, they responded, there is a better way! Alfred has a whole host of keyboard shortcuts that remain consistent regardless of what you’re looking at within the application. If you look at the list, scroll down to the iTunes Miniplayer section, you’ll see that you can use CMD+CNTRL+(arrow keys) to do many of the tasks that I do each and every day, and, they will always be the same no matter what.

Fantastic! Thanks Alfred. (I’ve always wanted to say that)

/via Simon Willison.

To keep my build of Chromium up-to-date I use Techcrunch’s Chrome-Up application built by MG Siegler and Greg Rosen.

Now that an official release of Chrome for Mac is out there it is being evaluated by some of the Macintosh community. John Gruber recently linked to someone who had tried Chrome for a week before it actually stuck. I can see why – switching browsers from Safari to Chrome won’t win you any new features. In fact, it may even force you to give up a few. But what makes Chrome better than any other browser on the Macintosh, at least for me, is pure foot-to-the-floor speed.

There are a few neat features, for sure. The “New Tab” page, arguably not as nice as Safari’s Top Sites feature, makes it pretty simple to set up a good way to get to what you want. Bookmark sync is nice. Extensions, I think, will play a huge roll in the success of Chrome – especially when it is pitted against Safari. Google has taken the right path with Extensions and how you build them, too.

But that’s about it. Here’s the one-liner for Chrome; it is really fast. Everything else is gravy.

Pie Guy is a fun game for your iPhone that is free, is installed via the Web (it is a fancy Web page), works offline, and is actually a lot of fun (works sorta like Pac-Man).

Neven Mrgan, the developer of Pie Guy, built the game – not only so people can enjoy the game – but to help show what is possible via HTML, JavaScript, and CSS for building games or applications on the iPhone using the Web browser rather than native cocoa technologies.

“If you find Pie Guy a fun game to play, well that’s grand.

But, I hope Pie Guy will also be an opportunity for the code-savvy among you to learn a trick or two about making serious web apps for the iPhone. Just grab my source code and tweak it. I’m not talking about just a fancied-up webpage here; this is a fullscreen game, with fast gameplay and responsive touch controls. I can’t wait to see what a better programmer does with this stuff (it’s not hard to program better than me!)”

A very notable thing to do and I hope a ton of talented developers take him up on it. I’d love to see stuff like jQuery for iPhone games/apps (which I’m sure exists in some form or another).

Also of note: As Neven pointed out in his announcement post – don’t try this on your first generation iPhones. This game only performs well on an iPhone 3GS.

This morning I’ve installed the bookmarklet from the site, installed the free version of the iPhone application, created a Fluid SSB with this really nice Userstyle by Florian Holstein, and I think I’m all set up to begin using Instapaper.

Stay tuned for how it goes.

Oh, and I’m back on the diet. I’ll be posting screenshots of my own progress once I get at least 14 days worth of data recorded into Weightbot. At which time I’ll be sharing my method for weight-loss this time around as well.

If you have an iPhone and want to track your weight; get Weightbot.

Source: Weightbot by Tapbots.
Additional resources: How to calculate your own BMI.

In my testing this application works very well and quickly over EDGE on an iPhone 2G. Two little niggles that I have with it are that it doesn’t search the address book by voice and that when I searched for “Chinese” I had to click on “Local” before it showed me the restaurants in my area.

Source: Google Mobile App page.
Download: iTunes App Store link.

Finally! I’ve been looking for an iPhone application that allowed me to quickly share my contact information with other iPhone (or iPod touch) owners. What’s more, is that if I have someone else’s contact information I can share that with others too.

Over the past year and a half I can not tell you how many times I’ve found myself in a situation where this application would have come in handy.

The fact that it is a free application is nearly absurd. There is a premium version, which is currently $2.99, so after giving this application a spin once or twice I’m going to buy the premium version — not to get rid of the ads but to support the application’s developers.

Source: Handshake. (direct link to iTunes)
Via: John Gruber.

Google’s Chrome, the new Web browser by Google, has been getting a lot of attention because of its simple approach to browsing the Web.  But there is more here than meets the eye. It is all about the approach.

The new application has its flaws, for sure, but what it gets wrong it makes up for in what it gets right.  Google has long been an advocate of speed.  ”Speed is a feature.”  Many other browser manufacturers, namely Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla, have continuously strived to push the needle on speed, faster page loading time, and overall memory usage of their software products. They’ve done this while also trying to jam more features into the browser.  What they’ve ultimately failed to do though, is what Google succeeded at; removing the application from the application.

Google’s approach here is interesting.  This is the first real step towards making the Web the application, and the browser just the “thing” that loads it into view.  Over on Daring Fireball John Gruber quoted this bit, which I find really interesting:

“In the long term, we think of Chromium as a tabbed window manager or shell for the web rather than a browser application. We avoid putting things into our UI in the same way you would hope that Apple and Microsoft would avoid putting things into the standard window frames of applications on their operating systems.”

You know how the iPhone or iPod touch loads web applications with nearly no UI unless you scroll up?  That is sort of the approach that Google Chrome is taking.  Just render the page in an insanely fast and stable way – that is the goal.

Is Google Chrome a “Single Site Browser” the way the next version of Safari is going to be or the way that Fluid already is?  Sort of.  In the “Page control” menu (not sure I like that name either) there is an option to “Create application short cuts”.  You can install these shortcuts on your Desktop, Start Menu, and Quick Launch bar.  Personally I think it would have been neat if they automatically asked to setup Gmail, Google Reader, Calendar, etc. when I installed – but everyone knows that they would have caught some serious heat for that if they did.  For those of us liking the SSB experience, Google Chrome works.

It is tough to say what Google Chrome “gets wrong”.  I’ve seen reports of various rendering problems, but I don’t think that is something Chrome got wrong.  That is fairly easily fixed in the next version so long as they iron out their use of Webkit.

To sum up; the approach Google is taking here is refreshing.  Clean, simple, and fast. A feature for feature comparison of Google Chrome against any browser would not be a fair way to gauge its affect on the marketplace.  Time will tell.

Now, when they release a Macintosh version, then I’ll really kick the tires.

Connected Flow, founded by Fraser Speirs, is very well acquanted with the Flickr API. Fraser developed both the iPhoto and Aperture plugins for Flickr. He also toyed around with a full Mac application that utilized Flickr, which was also called Exposure, but it was never publicly released. ((Though this application was never released, you can see screenshots here.)).

So Connected Flow is well-suited and in the perfect position to release an iPhone application for Flickr.  I said it was free above, but there will be a pay-version for $9.99 that will eliminate the ads.  This is very much the same model that I expect Twitterrific’s iPhone application to take, especially since Twitterrific itself does already.

Let me also say that I think this application is going to be extremely popular.  The fact that it will be a full-featured free application, with the option to buy, is going to make it a no-brainer for any Flickr + iPhone users.

Source: Exposure: two billion photos, in your pocket.
Connected Flow: Announcing Exposure. 

An example view in Times.

Personally I think this view is refreshing (though it could stand to use some more padding) and I can’t wait to see how this application really works.  The only application that I can remember having a view like this was FeedDemon, but that isn’t on the Macintosh.

Source: Read RSS Newsfeeds In Style With “Times” | The Apple Blog

Not only does Twinkle allow you to follow your friends, it also allows you to “follow” those geographically close to you. I expect, come June, to see tons of location-aware applications for the iPhone.

Source: Twinkle for iPhone lets you surf Twitter by location | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone.
Via: Josh’s Viddler video.

After lunch I decided to switch from Thincloud’s Twitter application to Hahlo and give it a whirl. Hahlo is great. It is quick, easy, and does nearly everything I need to interact with Twitter* and does it in an aesthetically pleasing way. I highly recommend using Hahlo.

Onto the Safari mobile bug. If you click a link in a tweet it will open a new tab in Safari mobile with that URL loaded in it. This is exactly as it should happen, because you wouldn’t want to have to navigate back to Hahlo. However, if you close the tab that it opened, Safari will replace Hahlo with the last tabs URL. This gets to be pretty annoying and I’ve found it happening in other applications besides Hahlo.

I have yet to figure out a sure-fire way to reproduce this in a consistent way and I can’t seem to find a pattern for successful opening and closings of tabs. But I can say this; this bug happens just about every single time a tinyURL is involved.

I’ve emailed Dean Robinson, lead developer of Hahlo, and he’s looking into it. I’ve also described the bug and submitted it to Apple Support.

Has anyone else seen this? Can you figure out why this is? Secondly, John Gruber recently stated that he’s finding the latest version of the iPhone’s software to be buggier than the previous – and I agree with him.

* By “nearly” I mean that Hahlo doesn’t yet have the ability to “friend” someone. Seems a little odd but Dean has assured me that it is in an upcoming release. Gauging from the work Dean has done so far on Hahlo – I’m sure it will be worth the wait.