2009-02-08 08:52
Tweetie and Chess With Friends
In my recent obsession to find the perfect chess app for the iPod I discovered that pretty much all of the applications could either play online or be really challenging chess engines – never both. Anyway I picked up the free application Chess With Friends as an introduction to the networked iPod chess world and convinced one of my wannabe chessmaster brothers to do the same. It is a great little application. Starting a game is easy and the interface is pretty user friendly. It keeps a record of all the game’s moves and has little tiny icons that show what material has been captured. So far so good (I haven’t completed a game yet). One feature lacking is a chat of any sort, so we have had to resort to emailing trash talk. If you want a game, my email is “chess” at thorsett [dot] net
Lately I have been getting into the whole twitter scene, due to my light brewing schedule so far this winter. It is a great tool for Flagstaff Brewing Company to announce new beers on tap and whatever else we need to tell the community. There are countless apps in the appstore that deal with twitter, but very few were appealing and lacked the features I was looking for, until I found Tweetie.
For starters, Tweetie uses a nice, quick and visually appealing interface that fits in with native iPhone apps. Seems so much snappier than NatsuLion. Tweetie also beautifully implements hybrid positioning (XPS via Skyhook) for all of us GPS lacking iPod users. Tweetie’s “Nearby” feature can filter tweets from 2-100km pretty quickly. Twitter trends are also easy to monitor with Tweetie’s “Trends”. Always fun, and sometimes unexpected, to see what people are talking about in the twitter world. Handling multiple twitter accounts is a snap with Tweetie, as well as a bunch of other useful features. I don’t know if I would ever use anything else to waste hours twittering.
