These days, when you want to play a computer game on your desktop computer or console, you click an icon, wait a couple of seconds and the game fires up. Back in the 1980’s things were significantly different. Most home microcomputers did not have a hard disk. They loaded programmes off cassette tape. The tape player was usually connected via a data cable to the micro computer and if you loaded up a game you could hear the data being loaded in to the computer by turning up the sound on the cassette player. The whole process could take anywhere between a minute, for simple and short computer programmes to several minutes for more complex and data heavy applications, such as games.

To make the whole process of “watching paint dry” – which is what it sometimes felt like when loading up a game – many games coders would first load a graphical screen containing, for example, the logo of the game, and then load up an intro-tune. In other words, a piece of music that would play whilst you waited for the main game to load up. This would provide a little light entertainment. As games got bigger and better the tunes also got better and better. The BBC Micro computer, back in the 1980’s had a four channel audio system which basically allowed the computer to play up to four “instrumental sounds” at once. This was plenty enough to make for enjoyable tunes.

What a stark contrast to today’s gaming experience. There’s a string of game loading tunes I remember fondly and often find myself humming either in my mind or more recently out loud to the little one.

Here’s a great example of a game called Firetrack (one of my favourites) loading up on the BBC micro. Along with the loading tune, you can also hear the constant burring of the data being loaded in.

The other thing that comes back to mind is the classic Acornsoft logo which you’d often see displayed whilst a game would load off tape. Acornsoft was an early software publishing company producing games for the then popular BBC Micro computer which was in fact made by Acorn Computers Ltd. Here’s an example of the Acornsoft game loading screen for a game called Super Invaders:

The other really cool thing I remember about the BBC micro and other computers of its ilk back in the 1980’s was just how easy and enjoyable it was to create programs that would run on them by simply typing in a few lines of code. I remember how I would often walk in to a branch of Dixons, a then popular high street electronics store in the UK, and walk over to their computer section where they would have a BBC micro on display, force quit the shop demo that was running and then type by hand my own little graphics demo application. The code was written in an interpreted language called BBC BASIC and the program I’d most often write was the one where you could get random shapes to appear all over the screen in a never ending loop. Here’s a great little video showing just that (and a lot more):

Oh, the good old days. Then came along the 1990’s and the affordable spread and availability of hard disks built in to home computers. The late 80’s and early 90’s also hailed the advent of more powerful graphic user interfaces. I remember being a die hard Acorn computers advocate and back in the late 80’s and early 90’s Acorn had launched arguably one of the most advanced and powerful home computers based on their early RISC chip called the ARM processor. ARM processors are found, now-a-days embedded in almost every mobile computing device, most notably mobile phones. The power of the then new ARM chip enabled Acorn to launch there multi-tasking 32bit operating system called Risc OS (technically it was a 26 bit OS) which was capable of running games that utilised solid 3D graphics, a domain that was exclusively reserved for the more expensive and dedicated arcade games machines which you’d never find in a home. Zarch is the name of a game that came free with the Acorn Archimedes computers, the first RISC based home computer that Acorn produced back in the late 80’s and 90’s. Here’s a short video showing just how advanced things had already become back then, and we’re talking over twenty years ago. You’ll also note from this video the WIMP interface of Acorn Computer’s RISC OS. WIMP stands for Windows Icon Mouse and Pointer.

My all time favourite computer game to this day has to be Elite. A 3D space trading and combat game. The basic idea of Elite was to pilot a space ship through several galaxies trading goods from planet to planet. As you traded you would build up more cash reserves by selling your cargo for a profit and slowly upgrade your space ship with better armaments, more cargo carrying capacity and better shielding, etc. Along the way, you might get attacked by pirates who have scanned your ship inventory and want to rob you of your cargo. You would have to defend yourself against these marauders. You could also choose the path of a criminal and trade in illegal goods which would fetch greater profits, but at the risk of being brandished a fugitive and constantly attacked by police ships. Or you could be a pirate yourself and attack other space craft and scoop up their cargo to sell on for a profit. This was all played out in a full 360 degrees 3D space environment. To get an idea of the type of gaming experience you got in Elite, watch this short video of the game running on a 8 bit BBC micro computer:

Elite is no more, but it lives on in the form of an open source clone called Oolite, which runs on the Mac. Anyone on a Mac should definitely check this game out and give it a go. It’s faithful to the old game and even goes as far as preserving much of the graphical interface with options to enhance the graphics, the features and gaming scenarios. There’s a huge community of developers constantly updating the game and there’s a discussion forum available for avid fans of the old game. Oolite still posses great game play which I find many modern day games lack.

That’s it for my trip down memory lane, all sparked off by me humming tunes from game loading intro’s on the Acorn BBC Micro computer to my baby son.

Here’s a great video demo of what’s soon to come. Check it out and leave your comments here.

However, on an on-going basis, I find that I am starting to circumvent Virgin Media’s normal customer services number/email and going direct to the person who left me a comment on my blog and who now also follows me on Twitter and regularly responds to my questions. When my broadband service went down the other day, instead of calling customer services, I twittered to my established “insider contact” who promptly replied. Whilst the service wasn’t working until much later in the day, I seemed to get the feeling that I was communicating with “someone real” or at least someone who actually knew what they were talking about as opposed to someone reading off a script on the customer services phone line. For me, that made me feel like my service problem was “noticed” and gave me a sense of confidence that the issues would be resolved.

All this makes me wonder about the way customer services will be perceived in the future for large companies that use call centres. For me, as a techie, I find value in this way of communicating with a service provider. I get access in to engineers and get robust technical answers to my questions. I don’t have to put up with the patronising call centre worker. However, as Twitter is used increasingly as a means to interface with customers and address their queries,I wonder what will happen to the quality and reliability of customer services? Will companies be able to monitor the efficiency of their customer service staff and more importantly will companies be able to track the cost of providing customer services via Twitter. When I say cost, I don’t just mean monetary cost, but also the cost of trustworthiness and a professional image.

Virgin Media

Enter Virgin Media with their triple pack which offers cables TV, phone and broadband all in one. The broadband service in my area offers 50Mb downstream and 1.5Mb upstream. Firstly, the deal is pretty good in terms of price. With my new Virgin Media set up I am paying on average £15/month less than what I was paying when I had two separate services; one for phone and broadband and another for satellite TV.

Virgin Media came around to install their service at my home today. I was greatly looking forward to the faster broadband service and interested to find out what sort of set top box I’d set for my TV service. Here’s a run down of what happened during installation. The installer laid in the cable from the junction box outside in to the house. He then discovered that he didn’t have a wireless router for me in his van and asked me if I had been sent one by Virgin Media’s customer services. Nope, nothing. The installer calls up a colleague in the local area and asks him if he has one in his van. No such luck. Installer proceeds with getting cable TV set up. Everything gets plugged in and TV is turned on. For some reason there’s no picture coming through. Therefore, we moves on to the third item which is phone. I’m told that because I want to keep my old number I won’t have a proper phone service from Virgin Media today as my old number still needs to be ported over. So far, nothing is working. The installer proceeds to install the cable modem and we try the connection out on my Macbook Pro. As expected and predicted the installer gets rather nervous and worried that there’s a shinny Apple Mac in front of him. He proceeds to tell me to load Internet Explorer. Clearly he’s never used a Mac before. No worries, I tell him, I actually have Windows XP and Windows 7 installed on my Mac and that I could load Internet Explorer for him. Since I have a web development background, I proceed with Firefox in Mac OS-X anyway and start stepping through the various initialization pages on the Virgin Media initial setup web site. It records my requested email ID, username and password. On the last page of set up there is a long pause as the modem reboots. Unfortunately the modem refuses to allow an open connection to the web even after restarting twice automatically and one after being restarted manually. At this paint the installer gets on the phone to customer services. He is acting and sounding rather frustrated, and I don’t blame him. He’s on hold for 15 minutes, which appears to make him feel a little embarrassed. I would be too, if I was in his shoes! Eventually he gets through and describes the various issues to customer services. Within minutes my broadband is up and running. Apparently I was still behind the Virgin Media firewall and so my account way manually activated by the customer services person on the phone. OK, so next up is TV. Apparently there’s a delay at the headend for provisioning new customers and I’m told my TV service will be running within the hour. Fair dues. The missing wireless router will be sent to me in the post and I should receive it by tomorrow.

Right, so I need to take another day off work to ensure I’m around to receive the package as it will undoubtedly not fit through the small letter box. If only it was all working today, but I guess that’s too much to ask for. I’d have expected at least the physical items to be all installed and working and the rest can no-doubt be configured remotely.

One hour later, my TV service is up and running. The modem is working, but I have to sit on the floor close to the TV where the modem sits and be hooked up via ethernet cable because I have no wireless router (which arrives tomorrow). I’ve still not got a phone service. I have to wait for my old number to be ported. At this point I do not know how long this will take and I suspect it will require a call to customer services, and no doubt a long wait on hold, to get that sorted out.

All in all, from a customer perspective, I’ve not had a very good first day with Virgin Media. No phone, no wireless. I suppose 50% of what I’m supposed to get is “good enough” for Virgin Media.

Ironically, Virgin Media picked up my excitement of about getting their 50Mb broadband service on Twitter and sent me a message which said “@virginmedia: @jupiterorbit Do let us know how it goes “. I’m afraid I had to tell them the truth and let them know that I wasn’t very impressed with their installation process.

The Virgin Media set top box

There are four types of ways you can access Twitter today, those being a) via a web browser, b) via an Adobe AIR application, c) via a native application or d) via a mobile application. Tweetie falls in to “native application” category. What this means it that instead of using another virtual machine such as Adobe AIR or Java, the application is written using the language and development tools for the native operating system and runs directly on that system as opposed to running inside a virtual machine such as AIR. In the case of Tweetie, it has been written to run natively on the Mac OS-X 10.5 operating system, and has already been available on the Apple iPhone for quite some time. The release of Tweetie for Mac OS-X marks a significant turning point for the developers of that application, for it will be the newly written, leaner and more modular application core of the new desktop client that drives the future development and coding structure of the legacy iPhone application that already exists today.

I previously reviewed another Mac native twitter application called Nambu which I love – although it has a number of quirks and bugs, which I have to hand to the developers of Nambu have been ironed out since my review appeared. It has to be said that no complex software is ever totally bug free and I’m sure there will be ongoing improvements and fixes in Nambu and Tweetie as time moves on. I also use Twhirl, Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop to access Twitter on my laptop. I’ve been playing around with Tweetie for the better part of two working days, so how does it stack up? Rather than doing a feature by feature comparison of each Twitter client, I’m doing to concentrate on Tweetie and talk about what I feel it does well, how it works and point out areas where I think it needs improvement or has gaps in functionality.

The first thing that you notice when you get to the Tweeite website to download the application is that there are two versions of it. The one being promoted up front is the premium version which is currently going for a very reasonable $14.95 (US Dollars) up until May 4th after which it’ll revert to its standard price of $19.95 – still very reasonable. The second version is, of course, the free version. As far as I can tell, both from what the web says and from application functionality, both versions of Tweetie are identical except for the free version where ads are inserted in to the time line and made to appear almost like tweets from an ordinary user. Cunning and modestly unobtrusive – and to the developers credit, there is an easily noticeable byline which clearly says “Ads powered by Fusion”. The premium version would remove these ads from your time line.

At first glance, Tweetie is a very pretty application to look at. As a Mac-native application it’s not overtly pretending to be an out and out integrated OS-X app. This is the criticism I’ve heard directed at Nambu by a number of people who consider Nambu to be too closely aligned with a bog standard Mac finder window. I have to admit, I love that aspect of Nambu, but applications like Tweetdeck and Twhirl have also proven that you don’t need to merge in to the standard OS-X GUI to work well.

So apart from looks, what else stands out? The developers of Tweetie have clearly put some good thought in to the user experience side of things. For example, the ability to configure the application to NOT scroll the time line every time a tweet comes in is very handy. When you’re following a lot of people, it can often be very annoying when a cluster of messages you were looking at suddenly scroll off, to be replaced with fresh new tweets. You can have Tweetie do that by all means, but you can also configure it to hold it’s position, allowing you to call the shots and scroll up the timeline as and when you’re ready to read more recent tweets. Nice.

As with nearly all other rival Twitter clients, Tweetie allows you to search for trends, words and phrases that may be contained in the tweets of the other people. The resulting list of search results can be “torn off”, as the developers put it, in to a new window and left open on-screen for you to monitor. It updates automatically and continue to pull in Tweets containing the search phrase you stated. What’s missing is that once you close the search windows you’ve torn off, there’s no search history for you to easily reference so you have to start from scratch and search again (this is if you remembered what you closed previously).

I like the compactness of Tweetie, in so much as that it doesn’t over use icons and clutter it’s clean layout. This is aptly demonstrated in the way it handles multiple Twitter accounts. Once you have more than one account configured, it will display all the accounts in the side bar. Unlike Nambu which has a set of duplicate action items to click on under every account icon, what Tweetie does is just re-arrange the side bar to bring your currently selected Twitter account to the top and then re-links the icons below to that account. OK fine, so you can collapse and expand the icons in Nambu to save on space and clutter, but I find the way Tweetie goes a step further in it’s organisation of side bar icons to be very nicely done. Top marks. The Tweetie side bar will give you access to your time line, @ messages, direct messages, a search icon and icons for all your other Twitter accounts (assuming of course you have more than one Twitter account, which not everyone does).

As I keep using Tweetie, I discover small features which make big differences. Last week I wrote about contextual short URLs by a service called lnk.by that was recently launched by my colleague Tom Newton and was featured on TechCrunch. Although lnk.by doesn’t yet appear as an option in Tweetie right now, you may want to check back with Tweetie in a few weeks and see what’s going on there. However, even without this contextual URL shortening capability, the very useful URL preview feature is just one of those little options that makes a big difference. Got a short email link in some of your tweets but you’re not sure if you want to click on them for fear of them leading you to some virus laden web site or to perhaps some other dubious content you’d rather not bring up when you’re at work, with friends or colleagues? No problem. Just configure Tweetie to un-shorten the URL as a preview, which expands it out to it’s full equivalent, and then click through to it when you’re happy and ready to do so. Simple but brilliant.

Powerful features such as the ability to thread conversations is also available in Tweetie. Say you’re you’ve exchanged ten or fifteen tweets with a friend using @messages and they’re dispersed throughout your time line. Tweetie will conveniently group the whole conversation thread together so that the original messages links through in one block to all other messages that were spawned from the initial one via @ messages or direct messages. This was something I was raving about in Nambu as being one of its power features and I’m glad to see this is nicely implemented in Tweetie. Tweetie’s aesthetically pleasing graphical cues also make it a tad easier on the eye and brain to follow a conversation thread when compared to Nambu although the difference in reality is small.

Have you just spotted someone tweet something that looked interesting and got your curiosity up about their other recent tweets? Well then a simple double click on the users icon will pull up their entire public time line in to one neat window. Further more, from this screen you can also view the users @ messages, favourited messages, and profile information. Where appropriates, URL’s in a users profile are hyper linked. You can follow or unfollow a person here and a number of other places within the Tweetie application.

A feature I do miss greatly in Tweetie is Growl integration. In it’s current version 1.0.1 release, there is no growl support, through I suspect I will be seeing this in a future version. Growl, for those not familiar with it, is a nice little app which constantly runs in the background and pops up update messages from a wide array of applications. For example, when I’m using Nambu, I can tell it to pop up all incoming tweets on the corner of my screen without bringing the main application to the foreground. It’s one of those taken-for-granted features which can be sorely missed when not available. I’d love to see this functionality in the next release of Tweetie, and also the flexibility to tell Tweetie that I only want to Growl notifications for @ messages, direct messages, all messages or only for messages which contain a URL or picture link. Now that would be very cool.

Here’s another thing. Like with TweetDeck, Nambu, Seesmic Desktop and Thwirl, I really like the ability to view multiple Twitter accounts all at once, arranged nearly as side by side columns or anywhere on screen at the users discretion. This sort of user controlled interface presentation is currently not possible in Tweetie. I can understand why. The developers have taken a very specific and neat way of handling the clutter within Tweetie, but I would have liked the option to customise the UI exactly the way I wanted it to be presented like you can in the previously mentioned applications. Maybe one for a future revision? I’ve been asked by many people why I’d ever want to do something like monitor multiple twitter accounts all at once. Well, lets say you’re a commercial business utlising Twitter to market multiple services or you’re a business engaging with customers via Twitter on multiple services or products. I would imagine that it would be mighty useful to be able to have right up-front the time line of tweets coming in for multiple accounts so that one person could monitor across all the accounts in real time without having to click an icons or use a keyboard short cut to shift between accounts. This is particularly important if you ever want to respond rapidly to a real-time situation or events which is being augmented or supported through Twitter.

Here’s a feature that’s sure to drive some people up the wall, but also prove particular valuable from an accessibility point of view. Not only can you control pretty much every function in Tweetie via a keyboard short cut, which is handy for those unable to easily use a mouse, but you can also get Tweetie to speak out tweets using the built in Mac speech synthesizer. I’d recommend headphones and/or hope for very forgiving and tolerant friends, colleagues or spouses when using this feature. Jokes aside, it’s a nice touch and I know that certain groups of people will use it beyond the novelty factor purely because it will enable them to interact with Tweetie in ways that other Twitter clients might not allow (yet).

Tweetie shows a great deal of promise and has a number of other interesting features hidden within it that I have yet to fully unravel. With a lack of any online instructions on the Tweetie web site or in the application, it’ll take me a bit more time to get accustomed to those others features, but I will report back with updates. What Tweetie has got going for it is that it’s a lean, clean, very attractively designed and fast application to run. It doesn’t require Adobe AIR or any other VM to be installed on your system, therefore saving you on disk space. Tweetie’s developers has spent quality time really thinking out the user interface very well and as such the application feels natural to use. Its copious and well through out use of keyboard short cuts will appeal to many people and its smart way of presenting conversation threads, supporting multiple URL shortening services and multiple Twitter accounts makes it a feature rich and capable Twitter client. Out of everything I’ve written about in this review, I’d have to say “looks” is where Tweetie wins and it’s intuitive support for drag/drop which many long time Mac users are used is also a great boon. However, I feel that Tweetie still hasn’t come out with a really wow-factor feature or service which makes you want to instantly drop your existing Twitter client and move to Tweetie – at least, not yet for me, although I will continue to use Tweetie, along side other Twitter clients as I have been doing for quite some time already.

Finally, some simple things that Tweetie doesn’t do which pretty much all other Twitter clients on the Mac or Windows PC’s do do are missing. No growl support and no way of listing who you’re following or who’s following you. I also don’t seem to have the ability to save my search history. Over-all, Tweetie is a great Mac native Twitter client and I’m sure it will continue to evolve and the developer of Tweetie will continue to introduce new, innovative and compelling features in future versions.

Lets shorten a youtube URL for example. These can usually get quite long. Typically, when you shorten a URL such as:

… using a service such as http://bit.ly/ you end up with a short URL looking like:

http://bit.ly/2dAcBm

As you can see, the URL is less than half the size of the original. This is great, but when you look at that URL, do you have any clue what that URL is pointing to? No, you don’t. Enter http://link.by/, a new service by Tom Newton. Tom created this new service because he says, “I think knowing what type of content you’re going to see makes people more likely to click through.”

What Tom is eluding to is that short URLs today don’t have any context. What his new service does is give short URLs that missing context and this is how Tom says it works. “The service has a table of domains and extensions that it knows to be video content (or audio or photos or a multitude of other formats – ed) so it returns http://WACH.IT/hashcode if you post a video URL from say youtube.”

This sound pretty cool to me. Instead of a jumbled up random looking URL, I get a URL which obviously says that I’m about to click through to a video, or audio or picture, etc. Tom also has some further tricks up his sleeve with this new service. Says Tom, “Once a twitter user from an AIR client submits URLs to the service… we track which user created the links so in the end you’ll be able to go to http://LNK.BY/jupiterorbit and see a list of shortened urls you’ve created and how many clicks they’ve received.”

During my interview with Tom I was curious to know what technology was behind this new service and how it actually presented itself on screen. I learned that Tom is exploiting the power of cloud computing by hosting the service on Amazon’s EC2 service and using their SimpleDB database. This should give link.by plenty of bandwidth and capacity to cope with load. With regards to the way the service will be accessed, Tom says “The site will just be a regular HTML site… so anyone can use the service by just navigating to the site, or with a little button link on their tool bar that we’ll make available. I’ll also publish the API so any application in any language can access the service, but I’ll also compile a very small library of code for AIR clients so that it literally takes a few minutes to get the service integrated into any AIR messaging client so at the end of the day… any human can use it easily in the browser, and any application can make use of it via the API.”

Soon after I had started to use a telescope, I joined an Astronomy club which back then was called the Junior Astronomical Society, which is now called the Society for Popular Astronomy (SPA) and still going strong. From around the age of thirteen, I would regularly attend SPA meetings in central London (Holborn Library, to be precise) and feed my enthusiasm for all things astronomical. I recall the enjoyment of sending in my observations to the various section heads, and receiving replies (typed letters!) to my various astronomy related queries. I still have some of those old letters in my archives.

Since those early days, my interest has expanded in significant ways. I’ve upgrade from that wobbly telescope and moved on to a Meade ETX105 which is a great little portable telescope. It has a built computer and electric motors which mean I can position the telescope correctly and then instruct it to slew towards a particular object in space without having to manually move the telescope myself. The Meade ETX105 is small enough to sling in to my backpack and go places with it via public transport and on holidays abroad. I’ve also got another two telescopes which I tend to use more often these days. One of them is a 110mm refractor and the other is a 66mm refractor, both made by William Optics. I have found the 110mm telescope is a superb instrument for observing deep space objects like galaxies and nebulae. The 66mm refractor is also a great observing telescope but I mainly use it as a guiding telescope when conducting astrophotography.

A lot of my time these days is taken up with imaging objects in space, a technique known as astrophotography. My main imaging instrument is an unmodified Canon 350D (Rebel XT) which I fit to my 110mm refractor. I’ve found DSLR cameras in general take some great pictures of deep space objects and tend to be a little cheaper than dedicated astronomy CCD cameras. I have both telescopes mounted on the same mount which is a sturdy HEQ5 Pro mount. This makes the whole set up significantly heavier and so I cannot just sling it in the back pack and stride off to a dark observing site. It requires a good 15 minutes of dismantling, reassembling and a further ten minutes or so of calibration and setup before I can start observing with it. It’s a superb looking instrument and mechanically and optically excellent. This whole set up usually gets moved in to the back garden for observing, although very recently, since April 2009, I have started to take my telescope set up out of the house and join local star parties where groups of observers get together and go out for a night of observing. This can be very exciting, especially if the general public are invited as then you get a chance to explain your hobby and the science of Astronomy to the layman who are often amazed by the views they see through a telescope.

Amateur Astronomy can be looked upon as a very male dominated, private hobby enjoyed predominantly by retired men, and I guess if you go to a lot of Astronomy clubs around the UK, that’s still the impression you’re going to get. However, the more I get involved in public outreach and spreading the astronomy bug to others, the more I’m beginning to discover how a younger, new generation of amateur astronomers are already out and eager to learn more about how our universe works.

If you are a young astronomer and looking to get more information on astronomy, then you should check out the Starlight newsletter and also consider joining the Society for Popular Astronomy if you’re in the UK. They have a section called Young Stargazers that’s dedicated to 8-16 year olds.

As an aside, Nambu is a Japanese surname and is also the name given to the semi-automatic pistol used by the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy during world war one and two but I’m not sure if that means Nambu, the software, has Japanese origins. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, but I thought it was an interesting anecdote to mention non-the-less.

The first thing that strikes me about Nambu is how familiar it feels. Thinking about it longer, there are two aspects of it that give it that familiarity. Firstly, it resembles TweetDeck is some ways and differs to TweetDeck in many other ways. The multi-column nature of TweetDeck is something you can also achieve in Nambu and it’s ability to search for phrases and then monitor them in a column is also similar to TweekDeck. The other aspect is that Nambu that makes it feel so familiar that it run as a native Mac OS-X application. When you open the application for first time, you see a window that looks not too dissimilar to the Mac OS-X finder. In fact, if you were to change the view to the “sidebar view”, the window would look even more similar to Mac OS-X finder. Using the sidebar, you can access a number of things which include the ability to view your messages, all messages where you have been mentioned, private messages, sent message, favourite messages, friends and groups. The side bar also gives you access to a while host of other functions which we’ll come to shortly.

For me, the stand-out features in Nambu include:

• The ability to login to multiple Twitter accounts at once. You can access those accounts from the side bar.
• The ability to display a list of common search phrases on the side bar for easy access.
• The very useful and nifty ability to list out all the URLs you’ve ever sent out in your Tweets and all the URLs that have ever been mentioned in Tweets by your friends to you.
• By far my favourite feature of Nambu is the ability to display threaded conversations. Lets say someone replies to your tweet with an @ message and then you @ message back to them and then some else @ messages back to you both, this whole thread will be displayed in a hierarchical manner. VERY powerful.

The interface feels intuitive due to the well designed Mac OS-X integration and the flexibility with which you can control the layout of Nambu’s UI is a power feature that will really enable the user to set up Nambu exactly the way they want to view it. Being able to login to multiple account is not unique to Nambu and the ability to save search phrases for future use and monitoring is also nothing too ground breaking but when you package this all together in to a well laid out OS-X application then Nambu really starts to shine. This is not the whole story, however….

The beta version of Nambu points to some interesting future integration which will really broaden the appeal of Nambu within the power user community. In an up and coming beta release, Nambu will have the ability to integrate with FriendFeed, identi.ca and ping.fm. This is something you can already do with Twhirl so it’s nothing immensely new, but it will help to broaden Nambu’s appeal. Ping.fm is a particularly useful service to integrate with. I use this service a lot to relay my Tweets out to multiple other web services, so that when I tweet a message it gets displayed in my FriendFeed, LinkedIn status, Facebook Status and a number of other statuses on a bunch of other web sites. This isn’t something that everyone will want to do, especially those who generally use Twitter to have social conversations, but there are many, especially companies, who use Twitter to send out marketing messages and engage with customers so the ability to publish once (via Twitter) and broadcast to many places (via ping.fm) is a welcome strength of Nambu.

The very familiar looking Nambu window which looks similar to the Mac OS-X finder.

One of the other other very handy functions in Nambu is that it will tell you how many messages you have unread, and as you scroll through them, it will automatically reduce your unread count, because it assumes the action of scrolling down the window of incoming Tweets is the same as actually reading the messages. This works well if you’re not too scroll-happy with your mouse pointer. However, if it annoys you, you can always turn this feature off in the configs.

One other feature which I think will start to make Nambu even faster and intuitive to use is its ability to set up user configurable keyboard short cuts to do almost anything and everything within the application.

For me, one of the big bones of contention in almost every Twitter client I have used is that once you have grown a sizable list of followers and people you are following, it start to get very difficult to find a particular person. Here is were Nambu offers two very nice features to help you out. First, the basic search function is very good in the way it displays search results. The results are conveyed in a visual manner that makes it easy for your eye to zero in on the person you’re trying to find. However, what’s more powerful, in my opinion, is the ability to organise your friends in to groups. By default, Nambu comes with three groups pre-defined which includes friends, family and business. You can create any number of groups and then start to add your Twitter contacts in to those groups. From then on, their messages will automatically start getting filtered in to these groups. It’s not too dissimilar to an email filter. For example, I’ve created new groups for “Breaking News” and “Social Media” and in to them I’ve placed people who regularly Tweet about breaking news from around the world and those who comment about Social networking respectively. I’ve started to find this feature extremely powerful and it helps me filter out the noise.

I’ll be following the developments of Nambu very closely and I look forward to its next release. If you’re on a Mac, this Twitter client, even though it’s still in beta release, and with a few rough edges, already provides a compelling alternative to the other Twitter clients out there.

Note that after writing this review, Nambu 1.1.8 was release with numerous improvements and bug fixes, so make sure you have downloaded the latest version from their web site.

Let me flip the question of this article towards myself and tell you all why I use Twitter. I got in to Twitter very much as an early adopter almost two years ago right when Twitter itself got started. The idea is that by using Twitter, you can post short 140 character messages to update friends about what you’re doing. The updates can be as mundane as “Just woke up, feel crap, need coffee” to “spent the last thee days working on an amazing article about my research work. Those interested can read about it at: http://www…..”. You find some people have full blown conversations on Twitter. The brevity of the messages acts as a catalyst to boosting the tempo of the conversation. No long ramblings; just short and pithy, to the point, up to 140 character long messages. The often ignored feature of Twitter that newbies who have just got in to it miss is the fact that you can lock down your messages so that only those people whom you deem to be your friend can actually view your “Tweets” – the term used for messages sent on Twitter. By default, whatever you say on twitter, can in theory be read by almost anyone who logs in to the Twitter web site but by making your “Twitter stream” private, something you can easily do in the configuration and settings page of the Twitter.com web site, you preserve your right to pick and chose who can see what you’re saying.

There are four types of Tweets that people can send. The most basic is you telling the twitterverse (as in all those people using twitter) what you’re up to. You type a message, up to 140 characters long and hit submit button and bam, everyone knows what you’re doing. All those people who are “following you” (more on that later) will read your message and another else who comes across your Twitter feed will also be able to see your message. The second type of message is a message directed at (@) somebody. In twitter syntax, you do this by appending an @ symbol in front of a Twitter ID (without a space between them) and what this does is allows everyone in the twittervese to see your message as well as alerting one or more people in particular that you’re addressing the message at them, all be it in a very public manner. You could do this, for example, when you’re talking about someone else in the third person, so to bring them in to the conversation, you could mention their ID in the message with an @ symbol so that the person concerned is alerted of the message, allowing them to reply. The third type of message is a direct or private message. This type of message is sent direct to the person you want to send it to and no one else can see that message. Fortunately, you can only send direct messages to people if and only if they are already following you. The notion of following someone is simple. If you see a message by someone on twitter that’s generally out in the open, and find it interesting, you can start to follow that person so that future messages posted by that person gets flagged up to you. They in turn can follow you back if they find your messages interesting. The fourth and final type of message you can send on Twitter is a “re-tweet”. This is simply when you read something on Twitter that someone else has posted and you repeat exactly what they said. Why would you do this? Well that person follows a certain limited group of people, but it doesn’t follow that everyone following you also follows that other person. Therefore, by re-tweeting someone elses messages, you are essentially boosting the “broadcast range” or the audience reach of that other persons message to your own circle of friends. They too can continue to re-tweet the message you just re-tweeted to them and so the cycle continues and so the reach of the message continues to widen.

As you can see, Twitter, as a tool used to virally spread messages in a kind of word of mouth manner, can be very powerful and extremely rapid. In terms of time frame for a message or occurrence of an event to get out there on Twitter to many thousands or millions of people, it could take a mere few seconds or minutes. This was evident during the recent terror attacks in Mumbai, India when thousands of eye witnesses near the region of the attacks started to send out messages on Twitter and in fact is was on Twitter than a lot of people around the world got to hear about the attacks even before the top local and international news agencies picked up on it.

Right, back to my question, then. Why do I use Twitter? I use it for two main reasons. Twitter is one of the many tools I use to market and promote things I do. For example, I write this blog and I help promote local clubs and societies. I work at a company and I happen to enjoy what I do and I love the product I’m working on. I use Twitter to tell the world about what I’m writing, what I’m promoting and what I’m working on. By posting a message on Twitter about the photograph I just uploaded to my flickr.com account, I immediately get eyeballs looking at my photo which sometimes results in more and varied comments being left on my pictures.

The second reason I use Twitter is perhaps more interesting then pure self promotion of what I do or write. I use Twitter more and more to see what people are saying about “stuff”. For example, lets say there’s a high profile technology forum in town, with prominent key note speakers and I couldn’t make it for what-ever reason to the event. I can use Twitter to search for messages regarding that event and stay abreast of what’s going on there. Many people at such events will have their mobile phone on with Twitter software installed on their phone handsets. As they’re sitting in the audience and listening to the proceedings, they will twitter short excerpts of what someone said, or the a summary of the announcement just made. They often tag their message with a word appended with a hash symbol (#). This, in Twitter lingo is called a hash tag. There are many dozens of web sites that have sprung up dedicated to indexing hash tags and making it easier for you to follow all the different topics threads coming out of Twitter.

Lets say you’re a large multi-national business selling a cable TV service or a phone service to millions of customers nationally or even world wide. Large businesses occasionally suffer from mismanagement or under resourcing which leads to much customer dissatisfaction which in this modern day and age gets broadcast around the world in many different ways. Some people bitch about the poor customer service they’ve received in their blog, other people SMS their friends to complain about the long waiting time on hold when they try to contact the company by telephone and increasingly, more and more people are venting their spleen on Twitter about their poor experiences with using services and products. It works the other way too. Many people are also raving about great services and products they’re used via Twitter. Intelligent companies out there have started to cotton on to this fact and now regularly have staff who monitor Twitter to see what customers are saying about them. By doing this, they can quickly move to fix a problem before it blows up out of proportion and starts to damage the companies image. More interestingly, Twitter now gives companies a very personal two way communication tool to reach out to their customers. What’s even more interesting then that is that companies will often not just talk privately to individuals but in fact publicly address at least part of the complaint or question. This, in many ways, humanises companies, especially those large faceless corporations that often have notoriously banal responses to customer service queries. It also allows a company to join the public conversation about them in a way that has never been possible before.

Therefore, for me, Twitter is one tool out of many to get my opinions and thoughts out to a larger audience and it’s also a way to track what other people are saying about other things I’m interested in. For many of my friend who are also on Twitter, they don’t use Twitter like I do at all. For them, Twitter is another way of instantly communicating with friends, getting to know other people from around the world and striking up a conversion. Twitter has many uses and as the service grows and evolves, I’m sure many more new and interesting uses for Twitter will emerge.

I’d like to know why you use Twitter. Please leave a comment on this article and let me know and by all means, do ping me a message on Twitter. The link to my Twitter ID is below.

© Robin Scagell, Galaxy Pics

Word about the Spring Moonwatch event had certainly got around by now and a lot of families came to visit us. Mothers, fathers, relations and children were all coming down to take a look through the telescopes. Here’s an interesting anecdote. I called Anglian to give me a quote for double glazing a few days ago. The gentleman who came around to my house a few days ago was very fascinated by the site of my William Optics 110mm refractor telescope which was standing in the corner of the living room. I told him about the Ruislip Lido event and asked him to come along since he was so interested in telescopes. Well what do you know? Last night, he turned up with his two sons! The elder one was very taken by the whole experience and I suspect he wants his father to buy him a telescope. Moustafa Ali, the Anglian salesman, hails from Egypt and commented that where he had grown up as a child, he would venture out in to the desert at night and see so many stars. Now that he lives in London, he feels many people are missing out on the vista of space and stars that can be seen on a really dark and clear night. He hopes that through signing up to WOLAS and getting himself and his sons involved in astronomy, they too can discover the wonders of space. How wonderful!

Last night’s observing session certainly prompted a lot of questions from the members of the public who were attending. I spent considerable time explaining the life cycle of stars, the nature of binary star systems and the reasons why Saturn’s rings are so edge on to us right now. The green laser pointer I was carrying in my pocket came in very handy and allowed me to point out many constellations and stars in the sky. It was pleasant to meet some public who knew their way around the sky. I met a gentleman called Nat who told me his favourite star in the sky was Polaris in the constellation of Ursa Minor. He kept talking about Polaris and eventually plucked up the courage to ask me to point the telescope towards it. I swung my telescope over to that star and offered Nat to look through the telescope and he was awestruck at the site of his favourite star, even though all he saw was a single bright dot of a star. It’s amazing what floats different peoples boat. The cool part about looking at Polaris was explaining how it was a binary star and that there were two stars circling each other under the influence of their mutual gravity and then showing the two stars split through the telescope by inserting a much higher power lens. This prompted me to swing the telescope over to Mizar in the constellation of Ursa Major (The Big Dipper or The Plough) which is a really great double star to show anyone. Quite a lot of people were amazed by the site of the binary system.

Another favourite of the evening was the Plaiedes. To observe this cluster of stars, which I like to describe as a cosmic treasure chest of diamonds, I set up both the 110mm and 66mm telescopes to look at the object at the same time and inserted a 35mm lens in the 110mm telescope and a 40mm lens in the 66mm telescope. This allowed two different people to observe the same object at once which seemed to attract a lot of people around my telescope.

Another member of the public was fascinated by the notion of a binary star system so I gave him a brief guided tour of a few more binary star systems and started out by pointing out a particularly interesting system called Capella, the 6th brightest star in the northern hemisphere in the constellation of Auriga. Although it appears to be a single star to the naked eye, it is actually a star system of four stars in two binary pairs. The first pair consists of two bright, large stars, both with a radius around ten times the Sun’s, in close orbit around each other. The second pair, around 10,000 astronomical units from the first, consists of two faint, small and relatively cool red dwarfs. Just in-case you’re wondering what an astronomical unit is, it is a unit of distance often used by Astronomers to describe the mean distance of the Earth from the Sun. Therefore, 10,000 astronomical units basically means 10,000 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun.

At around 10pm, we all start to pack up. The night was a perfect conclusion to Spring Moonwatch and most definitely ended on a high note. I greatly look forward to next years Spring Moowatch event at the Ruislip Lido. Much appreciation and thanks go out to everyone at WOLAS who put the time in and effort in to organising this annual event.

You can read about the previous two days of Spring Moonwatch on my first and second write-ups.