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November 20, 2009
 

Tweetminer - Tweet Scheduling And More...

Tweetminer

What is Tweetminer?

Tweetminer is a slick web based Twitter client for power users featuring a built in tweetable RSS (news feed) reader and a very powerful rolling schedule tool.  The basic client is free but for those of you who like to bite off a bit more there are also three different paid options.

Twitter Client

The Twitter client part of the application is on first sight everything you would expect from a single column client, allowing you to see all the regular timelines (friends, DMs, mentions etc.) and allows you to add timelines for individual users, searches and even lists.  You can also see and update your own timeline and reply to tweets/DMs as per normal.

What makes it really useful is that each tweet can be either retweeted instantly, added to the rolling schedule or edited.  If you edit a tweet you can retweet instantly or add to your schedule for tweeting later.  Very handy for retweeting the good stuff from your lists and favourite users without clogging up people's timelines.

You can also add multiple Twitter accounts if you're a real power user.

RSS Reader

The RSS reader, while not a full featured RSS client like Google Reader does allow you to add feeds and perform the following actions: Instant tweet, edit, add to schedule and flag for review.  It is lacking a decent preview so you do unfortunately have to click through and open the article to find out what it's all about.  With the scheduling you can either add it to your rolling schedule or select a specific time for the tweet to go out.

Schedule

Tweetminer features a very advanced scheduling tool allowing tweets to go out at specific times or to be added to a rolling schedule that you can set up in advance to operate between certain times on certain days of the week.  Items in the rolling schedule can ordered to your liking.

Premium vs Free

Tweetminer comes in four different flavours at four different costs:

Basic / Free
5 Twitter Accounts
250 Twitter API Calls/Day
10 Scheduled Msg./Day
5 Feeds
Default bit.ly

Budget Yearly / $60 per year
2 Twitter Accounts
1000 Twitter API Calls/Day
100 Scheduled Msg./Day
Unlimited Feeds
Use your bit.ly

Premium / $10 per month
5 Twitter Accounts
3000 Twitter API Calls/Day
500 Scheduled Msg./Day
Unlimited Feeds
Use your Bit.ly

Max / $20 per month
20 Twitter Accounts
12000 Twitter API Calls/Day
2000 Scheduled Msg./Day
Unlimited Feeds
Use your Bit.ly

There is a nag to upgrade after 5 days use if of the free version but this will only appear once per login so it isn't too annoying.

My Verdict

In all this is an excellent product, very slick, well designed and thought out.  The only things i think are missing is some way of reading the articles in the RSS feed without having to leave the app and a time/date stamp on the items in the RSS feed.  It's nice to know at a glance how old the news is.

One of the things that made a huge difference to me was that when I complained about the nags (initially it nagged a LOT) the developer @justinvincent got in touch straight away and made the nags far less annoying by only making them appear once per login.

Another nice touch is that when you use a feature for the first time it shows hints and tips.  You can hide these temporarily or permanently as you wish.

This app is a must for power users and news gatherers alike.  I even use it myself!

There is also a perk for users (or even non users) by way of a very advanced affiliate scheme so you can get paid for telling others about it!

Try it out free for yourself:
http://tweetminer.net

Filed under  //   Category: Social media   affiliate   app   client   retweet   review   rss   schedule   social media   tech   techforce   tweetminer   twitter   web  

Comments [0]

March 6, 2009
 

Play With Pictures - Product Review

Logo

Cutting images out of their backgrounds is hard.  Really hard.  All that zooming in and gently rubbing away with the eraser.  All that messing around with feathering and transparency.  All that fiddle farting about in general.  Then getting all those images together, scaling and rotating etc. to form a collage...  What a pain in the jackson!

Forget it.  Those days are gone.  Now we have "Play With Pictures" to do all the difficult stuff for us.  It really is very, very, very, very easy to use.  So easy in fact that it warrants use of a fourth "very".

So how does it work?

Once you've got the program open and set the canvas size (this is where you'll build your collage), you need to get your source image in there to make your first cutout.  You can do this either by hitting the "cutout" button (yes it really is that simple) and selecting a file or by simply dragging and dropping from anywhere.  You can literally drag things straight from the internet.  Pretty handy if like me you store all your stuff online.

Once the image has been dropped in the program does a bit of processing to find all the edges.  The accuracy of this part is somewhat dependent on the quality of the source image but it is more forgiving than you might expect.  This will leave you with a kind of jigsaw puzzle of image pieces.  You should be able to work out from this which bits you need to keep and which you need to lose.  Just highlight over the bits you don't want and they will be gone.  Don't worry too much about any rough edges or discrepancies there are manual erase and restore tools to sort out all that stuff.  When you're happy with your cutout, just hit the "add" button and it then added to your collage.

Moving, scaling and rotation are literally taken care of by dragging the image around in a logical manner.  Trust me when I say "it's obvious" because it really is.  It seems that "obvious" is a recurring theme in this application.

So what else do you get?

On top of that there are some basic post process tools like duplication, tinting (for matching skin tones and lighting etc.) and transparency just to make things fit a little better.

That's about as complicated as it gets really.

As an added bonus the guys behind the app are building a strong community on Facebook and Flickr enabling users to share tips and of course inspiration.  In case you don't find it easy there's a load of great tutorials on the website to help ease you in.

Now if that wasn't enough already...  They do competitions too!  Prizes thus far include things like cameras, iPods and digital photo frames.  You can find more info about them on the "Play With Pictures" blog.

Can I try it before I buy it?

Of course you can.  You can download a fully functional, time limited trial version from their website.

So what's missing?

One thing I feel is missing is Flickr integration.  As there's a Flickr group and it links to the community from within the app, it would be nice if you could download and upload directly from the application.  I'd also like to see a simple "blur" control to enable some basic depth of field matching for images in the collage.

I'd also like to see some basic deformations like skew & perspective in collage mode just to add a little more realism.

The all important verdict

I like it...  A lot.  It's so quick and easy, how could I not?  Within seconds I was cutting stuff out like a pro (well, nearly).  The price point is good for software of this nature too but I would advise that the developers extend that trial period a bit.  Although 15 days probably is long enough, the going rate is 30 days meaning theirs is sub par.

I say it's definitely worth a download and play even if you're not massively into "this kind of thing".  If you are into this kind of thing, just go and buy it.  Under £40 for a decent image tool...  How often does that happen?

The cold hard facts:

Website: http://www.playwithpictures.com/
Blog: http://blog.playwithpictures.com/
Twitter: @playwithpics
Price: £39.95 (inc VAT @ 19%)
Trial time limit: 15 days
Platform: Mac OS X / PC Win 32

Filed under  //   competitions   cutout   facebook   flickr   image   mac   os x   pc   play with pictures   review   software   techforce   windows  

Comments [1]

March 1, 2009
 

Review - Twitterfone - You Speak, It Tweets!

Twitterfone

Twitterfone is something to really get excited about.  To cut a long story short and save you from reading the rest of this most likely very boring blog post, Twitterphone allows you to send tweets by recording a voice message with your phone.  This service is currently in closed beta but invites are slowly being made available.  You can request one by going to http://twitterfone.com.

How it works

Like most of these these, you have to set up an account first and in this case register your mobile number with the service.  They need your number in order to know who is sending the tweet!  Once the account is set up you can start tweeting straight away by simply dialing the number and leaving a message.  And that is it!  This number also allows you to listen to messages.

You get up to thirty seconds to record your message and if you go over the 140 characters twitter allows, it's no problem because Twitterfone also puts a link to the audio at the end of your tweet.

All of the Twitterfone numbers as far as I know are non geographic land line numbers so you shouldn't incur any premium rate costs but it might be worth checking with your network operator first to see what the cost is because it can vary from network to network.

On test

Once my beta code came through I just had to give it a go and I'll be honest with you, I really wanted it to fail.  Not because I'm a horrible person but because speech recognition gone wrong can yield some very funny results.  Suffice to say it didn't fail at all no matter what I tried.

Obviously the first call I made to the service was a standard "hello world" test call.  Nothing exciting and it passed with flying colours.  The next call needed to be more tricky so I put on my best southern scumbag accent and let rip...  It still didn't fail, even though I was dropping "t"s and glottal stopping all over the place.  I was very impressed!

So it was time to get dirty.  What would happen if I beatboxed down the phone at it?  I'll tell you what happens...  It just keeps working.  It recognised what I said before and after the beatboxing and just left out what it didn't understand to be speech.  You can hear the beatbox test here:
http://www.twitterfone.com/l/4c45ffa1-6f58-4f23-a9aa-0221f035a9c4

Verdict

I love it.  It works.  You don't need to train it to your voice like most speech recognition applications.  Whether or not I will actually use it remains to be seen but as I use a Windows mobile the thought of being able to tweet without using that stupid stylus to type seems like a breath of fresh air.  I can't really give it a mark out of ten or anything like that because there is no benchmark to work against.  Twitterfone is the benchmark for speech recognition based Twitter applications and the bar has been set very high indeed.

Other stuff

What's really exciting about this for me is the fact that it proves speech recognition is possible without training and can not only recognise any voice but can distinguish voice from noise without too much trouble.  This will one day allow web video and audio content to become more search engine and accessibility friendly AT LAST!  The future is here!

Filed under  //   Category: Social media   mobile   review   social media   techforce   twitter   twitterfone   voice  

Comments [2]