I was going to write up a comparison of various Twitter clients available for S60 mobile phones, but since I haven’t gotten around to it, here’s a list of various apps and approaches.

Native Symbian apps

I generally prefer native apps over Java applets, but in many cases, this means you have to pay for the quality.

• Twittix (4,95€)
• Gravity (7,72€)
• WirelessIRC (15,48€)
• TweetS60 (free)
• TwitS60 (free)

I tried Gravity’s free demo, but the demo’s limitation of not being able to post tweets made it hard to get a day to day feel for the app. Still, it seems quite good, and I’d definitely buy it were I not about to switch phones. (Gravity is bound to the device’s IMEI code.)

NokiaExperts compares Gravity and Twittix, and while they declare a draw, Gravity seems to come out on top.

WirelessIRC is from the same maker as Gravity, but has a wider set of features.

An interesting project to follow is TwitS60, an open source Twitter app in the works. Originally slated for a release in July–August 2009, it seems there hasn’t been much going on since early spring.

Java

As I said above, I generally prefer native apps over Java software, but with Twitter clients, if you don’t want to pay, then Java’s what you get.

• Twibble
• Twim
• Jibjib
• Tiny Twitter

Twibble is clearly the front-runner of these apps. The app itself works well, but the settings interface and tweet actions contextual menu are quite jarring.

I haven’t used all of these, but based on their sites, screenshots and feature lists, Twibble and Twim stand out.

Web

• Twitter Mobile
• Dabr
• Slandr

Twitter’s own mobile interface if fairly good, but it lacks some basic features, such as deleting tweets — and considering how error-prone typing is on mobile phones, it’s a feature that I’ve sorely lacked.

I haven’t used Dabr or Slandr, but they both describe themselves as more full-featured versions of Twitter Mobile.

Others

Finally, there are the strange ones. Via Twitter’s IM and email posting API, there are many other possibilities of using Twitter.

The usually impressive Fring claims Twitter support, though in the first version, it definitely was an underwhelming experience. Fring basically slopped bunches of tweets as chat messages.

Another mongrel of an app is Jargong.

There are, of course, more apps and web interfaces out there.

Final notes

If you want the best client available, I recommend Gravity. Out of the free apps, I recommend Twibble. Casual use is served perfectly well by the web interfaces.

All in all, the apps available for S60 devices aren’t nearly as nice as those for the iPhone. But then again, the same goes for the apps for a Mac versus the ones for Windows.

Update: Added TweetS60 on August 24th, 2009.

Bruce Schneier: “We used to quip that ‘password’ is the most common password. Now it’s ‘password1.’ Who said users haven’t learned anything about security?”

Lisäisin tähän listaan vielä värikoodatut välilehti-ikonit ja Web Developerin kaveriksi Firebugin.

Is Matias Tactile Pro USB Keyboard the best keyboard ever? I have no idea. Luckily, there’s a lot more to know about keyboards.

I like keyboards that make loud clacking sounds when you press the keys. You can get big old “clackies” from the Kyläsaari recycling center for five euros a piece.

Step-by-Step Guide to Remote Assistance for Windows XP.

Ever since Marko Samuli showed me Firefox’s Session extension, my pain has been less. I’m actually able to close Firefox once in a while. It’s still miles behind Opera’s usability.

Processors can’t get much faster, so they’re going parallel, and sooner than you think. From a sidebar: “… Today’s single-threaded applications as actually used in the field could actually see a performance boost for most users by going to a dual-core chip, not because the extra core is actually doing anything useful, but because it is running the adware and spyware that infest many users’ systems and are otherwise slowing down the single CPU that user has today.”

Janne’s always-excellent Kuutio has moved. No links are broken, but the old site is still up and there’s no forwarding.

Via Kuutio: Fontleech, a weblog for free fonts, and some recommendations on free fonts that all designers should have, Vera and Libertine. This is a topic that has crossed my mind often, and Janne whistfully says that it’d be nice (if he had time) to upkeep a list of must-have typefaces.

While on the topic of keeping comprehensive lists, I will now meander into a little talk about weblogs, a favorite subject matter of oldtimer-bloggers everywhere.

One of my principles of running a weblog is to collect, in atomic entries, items that could be collected later into a list of resources. While categorization is one way of providing this kind of structure, it generally fails due to the difficulties of using categories in the first place. In my own blogging system I also use a freeform textfield called “topics”, in which is meant to tie entries together by other factors than their topic.

For example, when I was importing old posts into Fathom this, I noticed I had many posts in which I mused about Sunday evenings. Now, Sunday evenings is not something I would give its own category, but it is a topic I had returned to several times, and might do so again. How then, to connect each post without manually linking to each one? Topical keywords.

While I do have a tool that shows me all my existing topical keywords, I decided when I was designing the system that I’d leave the field as open-ended as possible. I hoped it’d allow me to accidentally create unexpected connections and complementary two-way links between entries of superficially irrelevant nature.

My excitement over topical keywords has so far proven unfounded — I have the same problems with keywords as I do with categories. How many keywords should I assign? What should they be based on? Feelings, moods, people, places? General or specific topics? Some of the problems of categorization go away with keywords, but others arise.

Tags have created a big stir lately in blogland. I like the idea. What I would really like to see would be open ontologies to map different tags together. And then I want automatic categorization. CS (that’s computer science, not Counterstrike) gods, do you hear me?

On par with me not writing here, like, forever, I’ve failed to mention that my computer (which has been acting up and bluescreening daily for a long time) is much better. I was given a brand-new 512MB RAM chip, and after removing the two older chips, everything’s been working almost flawlessly. Knock on wood.

I installed Audioscrobbler today. Not sure what to do with it, but still.

Another list of outliners.

WikidPad looks interesting, and for $12, it’s certainly in my price range. I wonder if the titles of pages are always WikiStyleWords in the outline view? I don’t think I like that.

Skwyrul still seems to be about the best two-panel outliner there is for Windows. It’s small, simple, and has full version you can try.

Dia is an open source diagramming tool. I need to look into some other ones. I’ll put up some links later.

Scent of an OS and The Mac is a hard mistress. While I like Apple computers (the 17" TiBook is the most drool-worthy computer ever built), I don’t look forward to learning the ins and outs of the Macintosh OS. It’s actually considered a bit clunky by a lot of designers I know. IBig icons and all that dragging and dropping, ugh.

Still, someone I know isn’t looking back from his switch (in Finnish).

It turns out that most Helsinki University students have two email accounts, one main university mailbox (firstname.lastname@helsinki.fi), and one departmental mailbox (e.g. firstname.lastname@cs.helsinki.fi). Why this is, I have no idea. This explains why I wasn’t receiving my test messages.

There’s many ways to access your mail: the university address is called a Mappi account, and evidently has several alternative webmail systems. The computer science department has two webmail systems, SqWebMail and IlohaMail.

Luckily, both addresses can redirected, although there are restrictions (Mappi is the only mail system that allows forwarding to non-university addresses).

Gmail-lite is a PHP-based, HTML-only frontend for Gmail. For browsers that can’t handle Javascript.

Mooter, Girafa, Thumbshot.net, WiseNut, iBoogie, ProFusion, Picsearch. Why do half of these have such horrible names?

Logitech has a new laser mouse that claims to make optical obsolete. This sounds good. Optical mice aren’t very accurate, and they tend to feel sluggish. While no mouse I’ve ever used beats Logitech’s standard gray, two-button and wheel mouse, the ball does get dirty.

The MX 1000 is cordless, which sounds good, but can cause its own set of problems. I also like the fact that the laser light is invisible to the eye. Try watching a movie in a dark room with a traditional optical mouse.

If only the MX 1000 wasn’t shaped so awfully.

Paul Boutin recommends using both Spybot and Ad-aware. However, Download.com reviewers complain that Ad-aware installs a worm called GLB1A2B and changes the home page of Internet Explorer.

A list of essential applications for Windows. I don’t know all the software, but I agree with most of the list. I prefer Tiny Firewall over ZoneAlarm.

Having had a few headaches with spyware, I downloaded WinPatrol (the first spyware-buster I’ve seen that hasn’t had serious integrity issues).

I installed a new hard disk after setting up my computer here in Copenhagen. It wasn’t that easy—but with computers, what ever is? Read more

From Pekka comes the recommendation to use Zoom Player 2.50 for DVDs. With all the problems I had finding a software decoder I’m a little too discouraged to even look into this right now.

DustBuster is a tiny piece of software that cleans up unnecessary temp files. Only problem is that it’s incompatible with HP’s DLA and Real's RealONE. All the info given is that users with incompatible software should not use DustBuster. Nothing is said about what would happen were I to ignore their warning and use the software anyway.

Freewire is based on Limewire’s open source technology.

Oh, and both of those software links are from Kenradio’s daily software picks.

I can't believe I've never read First Monday!

This guy’s doing his Ph. D. on attack-resitant “trust metrics” (think Advogato, Google’s PageRank) or something like that. Cool.