The one thing you must know about the Twitter app is that it can recreate a lot of Twitter history for you while you are offline. Thus, I have become a converted evangelist to the Mac App store, something I didn’t recognize the value of until today.
But today, the Mac App Store has rocked my world. I’m on a plane without wi-fi, and I have already written one blog post and am looking to “kill” some more time. So I randomly go to the open Twitter app on my laptop. The app is already there, I downloaded it on the day the App store opened, but I nearly always read Twitter through, say, Hootsuite.
Lo and behold! With the app, I am able to read back hours and hours of Twitter that I missed while driving to the airport, having a kick ass (secret) meeting with an entrepreneur AT the airport, going through security, and writing my first blog post. Moreover, I am able to follow some links and open the sites on my browser so I can remember to read them when I land and get online again. The experience was almost like Instapaper on my mobile, only actually better. After this flight, I will probably have followed and read more links than I ordinarily have time for in an equivalent time period.
This is more than an increase in productivity. This is an entire new world of capturing the online experience for me while I am offline. And I didn’t even know the app could do that.
That’s probably my fault. I test and download so much software and so many apps that if something isn’t immediately 1)apparent and 2)useful to me, I will probably never find it until I need it. (Listen up, developers. More people are like me than are like you.) That was the problem with Word and Excel in the good old days. I learned about six features in each, and never went back. As a result, I still can’t format a document properly. Good thing I don’t use them anymore:-) Now I compose in Google Docs and then download into those silly programs.
[Nice segue to Google.] I used to love Gears for Google Reader. Then they got rid of it, and didn’t (yet) replace it with HTML5, so I can no longer read newsfeeds offline. The Twitter app is the next best thing to what I used to do with Gears — catch up on essential things I need to know when I get off the plane.
Now if @southwest would only deploy its long-promised wi-fi…
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Do you use Reeder for iPhone or Mac (beta)?
That’s what I bought to replace Gears.
I didn’t know you could use it offline:-) I have it