Luey's Lab

Quick preview of the upcoming desktop version of Tweetie. Tweetie is a Twitter app, and is currently one of the most popular twitter iPhone apps.

I just bought an iMac G3 to test out, its going to be the first of many older macs that I test for the site. The goal is to establish the real value of these older Apple computers. Another aspect of this project is to determine the best software to run on each machine.

This iMac is a G3 running at 400mhz and has 384 megs of ram. It came installed with OS 9 but I upgraded it to the lastest version of Tiger 10.4.11. This did involve upgrading to 9.1 and updating the firmware first. So far I have used the latest versions of Safari and Firefox 3, Marsedit, BBedit, and 1password. All of these ran very well, in fact everything but the browsers ran the same as they do on my newer Intel based Mac. The browsers aren’t as fast but still very usable and stable. The performance of the software combination above makes the G3 iMac an excellent blogging solution.

Another test I ran was to edit a video. I recorded the video with my iPhone using Cycorder and edited it with iMovie 3, which is now available for free from Apple. The video editing also went really smooth with no crashes and the old thing that takes some time is exporting the final product. I have included the video below, and check back later for some more tests on this and other older Macs.

The ability to track topics and conversations on Twitter was a very useful feature that Twitter disabled. You can still search Twitter using http://search.twitter.com/ but you have to do it manually each time you want to find something. The search feature does work well for discovering the most popular topics on Twitter.

If you want to track topics or keywords in real time, all you have to do is add “laconica@west.spy.net” as a contact in your jabber supported chat client. I recommend Adium http://www.adiumx.com/ which allows you to use iChat, MSN, Google Talk, AIM, Facebook, and many more all at the same time.

Once you add “laconica@west.spy.net” as a contact, send them a message with the word “help” and you will get a full list of commands.

Here are some of the key commands.

add_service – Add a service you can post to.
help – Get help for commands.
off – Disable updates.
on – Activate updates.
post – Post an update to a service.
services – List all known services.
track – Track a topic
tracks – List your tracks.
untrack Stop tracking a topic

To add your Twitter account just type this message

“add_service twitter username password” of course substitute your username where it says username and your password where it says password.

To track a topic, simply type a message

“track topic” replace the word topic with any word or phrase you want to track.

This also works for identi.ca and army.twit.tv

If you have any questions, post them into the comments.

Spaces is a new virtual desktop feature in Apple’s Leopard 10.5 operating system.  It really makes multi-tasking easy and keeps everything organized. I use six spaces or six virtual desktops and I assign different programs to open in a particular space. For example, you can have your web browser in space one, all your instant messaging programs in space two, Itunes in space three, etc, etc. There is one problem with Spaces and that is it will automatically switch to another space if there is some kind of pop-up or notice.  In my case I can be typing away on a blog post and then all of a sudden I’m switched to my email because an update failed.  There is nothing in the system preferences to stop automatic switching between spaces so you have to use this simple trick.

First open the Terminal application, in Utilities.

type

defaults write com.apple.Dock workspaces-auto-swoosh -bool NO

then close Terminal and restart the computer.

If you want to change it back, just do the same but type

defaults write com.apple.Dock workspaces-auto-swoosh -bool YES

If you have any questions or have your own fix to this problem. Leave a comment below.