Lounge – Twitter App for Mac and iPhone

A new Mac OS X Twitter app on the block, Lounge, is a multiple account Twitter app that allows you to do most things with ease, tweeting, replying, direct messages, favourites, retweet and even lets you learn more about a particular user by displaying a user’s profile, followers/following right in the app itself (very useful).

Lounge for Mac is currently in beta, you can download it free at the website. Lounge’s accompanying iPhone app is now at 1.0 and is currently available at the App Store.

Lounge’s User Interface

The user interface is straightforward with tweets on the right and functions on the left.

Features

Notice that all the frequently used functions are displayed on the left. You can also hide the sidebar by hitting a hot toggle key “Cmd+Opt+C”. Here’s an explanation of the various sidebar functions:

My 2 Cents: All the tweets by you
Favourites: Tweets that you marked as favourites
Friends: Your friends twitter stream
Replies: Your @replies
Vanity: All the tweets from the Twitterverse that mentions your user name
Everyone: Main timeline
Search: You can do a Twitter-wide search here with option to save result
Received: Private messages that you’ve received
Sent: Private messages you’ve sent
Followers: All your followers
Following: All tweeps that you follow

Reply Chains

One of the problem that most Twitter users face is that there is no obvious way to view what your friends are replying to when they send you an @reply, and vice versa. With Lounge, viewing reply chains is a breeze.

Tweeting Options

For every tweet, you can choose to retweet, link to tweet, copy tweet or tweet URL etc.

However there is no way for you to set the retweet format, eg. “RT @username” or “(via @username).

There’s is also no feature to let you conveniently shorten a URL. But keep in mind that Lounge’s Mac app is currently in it’s beta, if we’re lucky we might see these feature in future releases.

Check a User’s Profile

Checking a user’s profile is only a click away (click on the user’s avatar). There is no need to launch the user’s Twitter profile page as the information is shown in the app itself, which is a very neat feature.

Multiple Accounts

For people with multiple Twitter personalities this feature is a god-send as it streamlines all your account in one place. Switching an account is a click away. This is something I have been waiting for from Eventbox which is still lacking.

Growl

A growl notification is triggered each time Lounge checks for tweets. It’ll only show one latest tweet and tells you how many more new tweets were fetched.

You can only turn off growl notifications from Growl’s preference pane.

Preferences

This is all there is to the preference pane.

Set your hot key to activate Lounge window (very similar to Twitterrific and Eventbox) and an option to use your return key to send tweets.

Lounge iPhone App

The iPhone app is a a little half-baked when compared to popular Twitter iPhone apps like Tweetie and Twitterlator. There is no retweet or Twitpic functions, means that there is no easy way to retweet your friend’s tweet, or share a pic via Twitpic with your friends on your iPhone app. The current version is 1.0, hopefully the later versions will bring these major functions into the app.

User Interface

The look and feel is the same compared to the Mac app, which is a good move to tie both apps from different platforms together. You can do pretty much the same things that you can do with the desktop version.

Landscape Mode

One of the first I’ve seen, displaying tweets in landscape mode while letting you switch accounts with just one click.

Search

The search function lets you group a combination of different criterias and save it, much like using smart folders.

Ultimately, I’m not sure if you should buy this iPhone app now if you’re comparing features with Tweetie or Twittelator. But the perks about this app is that if you’re also using the Mac app, the next version of Lounge iPhone App (1.1) will let you synchronize various kinds of meta data so the transition from your Mac to your iPhone and back again will be seamless.

UPDATE (22 Mar 09):

Retweeting via the iPhone app is available but it wasn’t very obvious to me when I was using it – tap a tweet’s body in the tweets detail view and you’ll be presented with a number of options, retweet, link to tweet etc.

12 Useful Mac Apps To Rock Your iTunes Experience

iTunes is a great software to manage and listen to our music, but the experience can be further improved by using additional plugins or apps. These plugins / apps basically extends the functionality of iTunes, enhances iTunes, or both, to satisfy some of the needs that iTunes cannot provide.

Here are 12 plugins / apps that you will find useful when used with iTunes.

Cover Stream

[$20 | Website]

Cover Stream puts coverflow into a HUD window that you can summon with a pre-defined hot key. You can browse your music library and control music easily in that window without having to use iTunes to do that. Cover Stream also integrates with Last.fm flawlessly, scrobbing your music while you listen to them.

CoverSutra

[$20 | Website]

CoverSutra is one of the most mature and popular app to control your iTunes music without switching to iTunes. The app features one of the best user inteface design, using the app is a real pleasure. With CoverSutra, you can search music, see the currently played song’s  album art on your desktop. Integration with Last.fm is also one of the feature.

GimmeSomeTune

[Free | Website]

Truly one of the most essential app to compliment your iTunes. GimmeSomeTune fetches missing coverarts and lyrics in the background while you listen to your music. I have tried many coverart and lyrics fetching apps and I must say this is one that really gets both the job done well. The best part is, it’s free.

Bowtie

[Free | Website]

Designed by Laurent Baumann, also responsible for Fontcase, Bowtie is a beautifully designed free iTunes controller that allows you control your iTunes music unobstrusively. You can also put the now playing song’s coverart on your desktop. Bowtie also features downloadable themes for the CD Cover that houses the coverart which you can start by downloading the themes here.

Tangerine

[$24.95 | Website]

Designed by Potion Factory, also behind The Hit List, Tangerine analyses the tempo of your music and lets you easily create playlists of music grouped by it’s tempo among many other options. Great app if you hate the idea of manually choosing songs for your next workout etc.

Awaken

[$15 | Website]

Awaken lets you play music when you’re sleeping, sleeps your Mac utilizing a sleep timer, and wakes you and your Mac up with your favourite music. You can also use Awaken to alert you about anything else other than waking you up by using the egg timer. Control the alarm and sleep timer with your Apple Remote from across the room while running Awaken in fullscreen mode.

CoverScout

[$40 | Website]

CoverScout scours the internet for coverarts and adds it to your albums. The neat part is that you can edit your coverarts by rotating, cropping, scaling, straightening and even adjusting the color levels of the image.

SongGenie

[$33 | Website]

SongGenie aids you in filling in missing meta datas of your tracks like descriptions, artist names, track names, album names etc, making your iTunes library much more useful and tidy. Written by the same developers from CoverScout, SongGenie integrates with CoverScout by assigning the tasks of adding album arts to your tracks to CoverScout with just one click.

TuneUp

[$29.95 or $19.95 yearly | Website]

UPDATE (Discount for SUBERAPPS readers)

TuneUp is offering a 15% discount promo code for SUBERAPPS readers, just enter SUBERAPPS during checkout, valid till 15 April 09.

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TuneUp cleans your tracks by fixing your mislabeled music and missing coverarts. The app adds a new sidebar to iTunes with all the tools you need to use to clean up your music. The now playing tab displays information about the track and even lets you play the music video of the track right in the sidebar (video fetched from YouTube). TuneUp was really buggy when it first launches late last year due to the overwhelming response but I guess they should have cleared out the kinks by now. Read more about TuneUp in a review written in December last year.

YouControl

[Free | Website]

You Control basically lets you control your iTunes music library via your menubar without switching to iTunes.

DockArt

[Free | Website]

DockArt does a simple but extremely useful job by replacing the default iTunes icon in your dock with the currently playing music’s coverart. When you stop your music, your iTunes icon reverts back to the original one.

AutoRate

[Free | Website]

AutoRate automatically rates your tracks based on how often the track is played and how often each track is skipped. Might not be the most accurate, but a good start if you are not really active in rating your music.

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Once again, if you have any other suggestions for a good iTunes app / plugin, please feel free to comment!

Remove Text Formatting With Plain Clip

I believe most of us have the same gripe about copying text and pasting it onto another application but not wanting the formatting to be pasted as well.

There are many ways to strip text of it’s formatting, eg. pasting text into Text Edit, selecting “Make Plain Text” from the top menu, copy the text and pasting it into your desired application. Or pasting the formatted text into your browser’s address bar, select all and copy the text again before pasting the text into your desired application.

All these takes a number of steps and all these time adds up to cause annoyance, here’s an easier way to strip text formatting, meet Plain Clip (Free).

Faceless Application

Plain Clip is a faceless application, meaning there is no user interface, you install it on your Mac, the next time you copy a formatted text, you only need to launch this program to remove it’s formatting. What happens behind the background is that when Plain Clip launches, it strips the currently copied text on the clipboard of it’s formatting and closes itself. So that you can paste the currently copied text in it’s unformatted glory.

If you’re using an application launcher program like QuickSilver or LaunchBar, the process of stripping formatted text is even faster.

Using TextExpander with Plain Clip

But here’s the quickest way. This will require to be a proud owner of TextExpander ($29.95). For those of you who have no idea what TextExpander is, it’s a Mac app that expands your pre-defined text snippets, images or both by typing an abbreviation. More info about TextExpander in this post.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Create a new snippet
2. Paste this into the snippet field: do shell script “‘/Applications/Plain Clip.app/pc’ -v”
3. Select “Applescript” as the content:
4. Assign an abbreviation to your snippet, eg. ;pc (pc is for Plain Clip, so it’s easy to remember, you can use your own abbreviation of course)

The next time you need to copy a chunk of formatted text, type “;pc” and voila! You pasted text will be unformatted. The fastest way to un-format and paste text at the same time.

Have fun!