As Amit Agarwal pointed out in his (very detailed) post, the new FeedDemon is a great Twitter client, with a whole bunch of features to make using Twitter easier.

One thing that a lot of people don’t know is that FeedDemon’s newspaper layout is very customisable, I while I use the Surfer theme usually, I found that for Twitter feeds it was very annoying.  Showing the title is useless because the body of the post is the title, also, the large spacing around each post just used up a lot of space and meant I had to keep scrolling a lot to read the feed.  Also, the thumbnails view is pretty useless for a Twitter feed, seeing as it’s just full of people’s profile pictures

So I took the surfer style & I’ve customised it for a Twitter feed (download here).  FeedDemon is great in that it lets you set a custom newspaper style for particular feeds (Feed Properties -> Advanced).  The new Twitter style removes the thumbnails, removes the post title unless you’re in headlines only view and trims a lot of the extra whitespace.  Also I removed most of the action buttons as I don’t tend to send tweets or clip them (and if I want to, there are keyboard shortcuts) and unfortunately, which buttons show can’t be customised per feed.

Also, you can make your own custom buttons, so I added a Retweet button next to the new Reply button that sends you to Twitter with the retweet filled in ready to send.  This was surprisingly simple. The fact that Nick has used standard xslt to style FeedDemon rather than a proprietary format means that you can do pretty much whatever you want to, which is awesome!

So this is what it looks like now

If you want to give this a go, download this file and put it in the c:\Program Files\FeedDemon\Data\Styles folder & restart FeedDemon. Alternatively if you a reading this in FeedDemon you can just click on the download link & it will install it for you.  Then change the style for your Twitter feed(s) by right clicking on the feed then going to Feed Properties -> Advanced and pick Twitter from the list of Styles.

This is just a first idea, it probably needs work.  I’m debating moving the buttons under each tweet, but I’m not sure.  Also I’ve written this for the new FeedDemon 3 Beta.  It may well work for earlier versions, but I don’t know.  There’s a topic for this style in the Newsgator styles forum where you can leave comments / suggestions, or you can leave a comment here.

Oh, and you can follow me on Twitter here.

One of my mates got a new mac & the other day I was having a play around with it. It is sweet.  The UI is out & out gorgeous, no question. It’s intuitive too, I really haven’t used a mac since I was in high school, but it all just worked.  The photo application using the built-in web cam was a lot of fun & the Time Capsule app is really nice (plus its interface, like everything else, is just plain fun).

The new iPhone looks to be much of the same, beautiful design, easy to use software and, soon to be available, lots of third party apps to install.  The ability to sync with Exchange looks to be a really good feature, this puts it in direct competition with the Blackberry.   The new iPhone will finally get 3G networking support too.  A lot of people wondered why this wasn’t in the original iPhone, but none the less it will have it now.  It’ doesn’t have video recording or video calling facilities, and while some may wonder why, I don’t see this as a problem.  Video calling was the original major selling point of the 3G network, but it really hasn’t taken off.  I’ve got a 3G phone & I’ve only ever made a single video call – when I first got it to test it out – but it’s just not feasible to use normally.

This brings me to my point.  The new iPhone will run on the 3G network, but it won’t have MMS or video facilities.  Have a look at the features page, it ain’t there.  It will take photos, and you can email them or sync them with the new MobileMe service, but you can’t directly send them to other mobile phones with MMS.  It’s certainly not a big deal, but this is such a simple feature I’m really not sure why it would be left out.  It seems like Apple doesn’t want it’s users to know that there are other 3G phones out there, it’s the walled garden all over again.

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