broom's blog

Why I Moved Away from Tweetbot

I bought Tweebot and used it for a week. Then I switched back to official twitter app. Here is why.

Tweetbot does have some “personalized” features. It has a dark theme and fancy sound effects, but I don’t really care about these stuff. It has left/right slide gesture, but I found them not intuitive and hard to memorize. The double/triple click is not always detected, so sometimes I have to click lots of times of a tweet and feel myself silly. The customizable tab looks useful, but not for me. What I want is to use a list as a tab, like what I do with Echofon for Mac. But Tweetbot doesn’t support that.

Besides these specious features, Tweetbot has some shortcomings compared to official app. “Discover” is an important part in official app. I check it at times and find it interesting. Another crucial advantage of official app is speed! When view conversations or tweet detail, official app is obviously faster than Tweetbot.

Tweetbot does have a few delicate features that worth noting, such as the “unread counter”, and “select the last photo from library”. However after all, official app is a much better choice for now.

—–After a year——

Using Tweetbot on iPhone and iPad. Maybe just tired of the look and feel of the official app.

Twitter Open House

Went to an open house event at twitter NYC office. There were 2 short speaks: one was a twitter semi technical introduction and the other was about real time search. Not very in-depth actually. Some Q&A were quite deep though. I guess most audiences were engineers and some of them do search-related works.

An interesting thing is I met @nk, who I saw once 2 years ago in Beijing QCon. He gave a presentation about real time search at that time, a really great one. It’s very nice to see him again and have some talk.

In twitter office there are some photos on the wall, with tweets. The most impressing one is a photo of the airplane on Hudson river. That was probably the first photo of that accident online. And a funny video to tell u tweet is faster than earthquake.

I have always been respecting twitter as a company. They are doing something

Changing the world.
Helping ppl’s daily life.
Open. Compared to close system like FB and Apple.
Elegant. From a product perspective.

The more I respect twitter, the more I feel sick of sina weibo…

An American Weird Game

Learned that on today’s FreeWheel 5-year anniversary party(hooray~)

Get an inflated balloon. Bite a small hole on it do air can come out, then immediately put your mouth on the hole and inhale as much as possible. Now SPEAK! You will find your voice becomes very weird… Like a baby.

It’s probably because the balloon increased the air pressure in your lung. But it remains mystery to me that how Americans invented this game and why it’s popular here…

Btw, Chris showed us he can bite balloon to make it explode one after another, like nothing happened! Monster!

—

Talked with a few ppl, and found the funny voice was not from pressure, but from Helium. See here.

My Wife is Young

2 ppl came to my place today to check bills. Xw was at home.

They introduced themselves, blar blar blar. But xw couldn’t understand them well.

So they asked: “Are your parents at home?”

PARENTS? REALLY?

Skyrim All Achievements Done

Race: Khajit, Level: 50, Main Combat style: archery/sneak, Game time: ~150 hours.

skyrim

It’s no doubt Game of The Year for 2011. Many many awards. And the “arrow in the knee” meme was a quite unique phenomenon for a video game. I guess most ppl who used this joke never played Skyrim, lol.

This was actually my first time to finish a “sandbox” style game. This game style tries to give player as much freedom as possible. Skyrim did give you FREEDOM. There are 9 cities in the world map, except the first one (Whiterun), you can visit the other 8 cities in any order, any time! And the huge huge world map is full of villages, caves, ruins and tasks. There is an achievement for “discover 100 places” but it was done in a pretty early stage. I guess the total number of places may be around 300! And sometimes I got over 20 open tasks and 4 to 5 story lines going on simultaneously. I’ve never played a game with so many free choices. If you play it in a mood of “finishing tasks quickly”, it would make you anxious and a little bit uncomfortable. But once you stop rushing and begin to wander on this huge land, you will immediately feel the pleasure. Every character has his/her background and small story; numerous and various animals running around; new tasks come in and open tasks are closed like a flow; you’re the hero and resolve every difficulty on this cold continent. It’s a ridiculously addictive experience.

Don’t be too critical to its fighting style. It’s shooting(archery) can’t compare with real shooting game, and its action combat is far from a real action game too. The spirit here is possibilities. Many skills can be combined in any way. Lots of interesting combat style can be created.

The last achievement I got was “Reach level 50”. All other achievements were done at level 43. Then I tried to level fast, by pickpocketing every person I met, enchanting lots of junk weapons, spending money to train skills, etc. The only missable achievement is “Get 15 daedric artifacts”, because you need to choose the right option in every daedric quest. Just remember to follow those evil god’s instructions then you will get all those artifacts.

Btw, I’m going to trade in the game (XBox version) this week. Let me know if anyone wants to buy it…