Cristiano on Tech/Life

Last week I did a quick review of my favorite iPhone apps that I had tried until then. Since then I managed to try a few more that I really love. So here it goes.

Facebook - I never liked Facebook, way to messy and time consuming. But with the Facebook application for the iPhone, using Facebook becomes a breeze. Dare I say it is easier to use and loads faster than the site? Plus when you load your Facebook contact list it is like having the Web2.0 address book that Tim O’Reilly has been talking about that much.

Instapaper - This little app is great for reading on the road, but it took me a while to get what it was. The concept is actually fairly simple. Get an Instapaper account (free) and install the bookmarklet. Then, when you want to read something later, press the bookmarklet. Instapaper will save the link and strip the contents for you. Now, before you go on the road, open the iPhone app, sync the app, and voila you can read all your articles on your iPhone. Doesn’t sound impressive enough yet? The best thing is that once synced, you don’t need an internet connection to read your articles! Real Insta-Paper!

Wordpress - I just love application for the iPhone that make stuff that you “could” do in a browser work way better in a native application. The Wordpress application is great for writing that first draft of that blog post on your phone while sitting in the tube or bus.

Twinkle – Twinkle used to be the best illegal 3rd party iPhone Twitter application for the pre-2.0 firmware. When it was released in the AppStore though, it was slow, buggy, and just not what it used to be. The 1.1 version changed a lot though and I think this has become my new favorite Twitter client. Why? Because in contrary to Twitterific it doesn’t have advertisement!

Exposure – This is not an alternative camera software application, but a Flickr client. It allows you to view, comment, favorite and read your Flickr activities. Again, you could do this in a browser, but somehow doing it in a native application that uses the Flickr API is faster and easier. To bad you can’t use it to make photos and upload them yet, but that will definitely be a later add-on.

Aurora Feint – This is probably the best game for the iPhone. Clearly not just build to be a proof of concept old-game for iPhone port like the many break-out clones, but truly a great game. I got Melinda to play it and she was instantly addicted to it. Best thing again: it’s free!

I use Textmate as my favorite editor, especially when I’m working on a Symfony project. Recently though I decided to switch to integrating the Symfony installation as an external dependancy to my project. This had some major advantages but one very big disadvantage.

When I want to open a file in the project that I have open, I just type Command-T for “Go to File..” and start typing the file name (very much like Spotlight). When I added Symfony as a dependancy this added quite a few more files to my project, which made the search dead slow and returning numerous useless results.

So I decided to do a quick search on how to exclude folders from this search and found it. In the project’s side panel, select the root of the folder structure. Then press the I in the right-bottom corner. This opens an information window in which we edit the folder pattern to add an extra exclude. For Symfony I decided to exclude the “vendor” folder so I added a “|vendor” after the “|CVS”. Be sure to save the project afterwards or all settings are lost.

You can do the same in the general advanced settings of Textmate but keep in mind that any existing projects need to be updated manually to include this new pattern.