2011 is coming to a close, so I'd like to take a moment to highlight a few apps and games on Mac and iPhone that have been invaluable to me. I broke this out into four categories, each with two apps. I have purposely omitted iPad, because frankly, I rarely use my iPad (and I prefer the TouchPad over the iPad), and don't feel I've played with enough iPad apps to really give it a fair shake. So I've left that off to focus on iPhone and Mac apps and games. I hope you'll check out all of these great apps.

DISCLAIMER: I am friends with the guys at Tapbots (makers of Tweetbot) and the guys at TapTapTap (makers of Camera+). However the apps would not have made it onto the list if they were not of the highest quality, and have not influenced my reviews. I have deliberately excluded apps made by any company that I have worked for either now or in the past. I have also not included affiliate links.

Best iPhone Apps

$2.99 - Tweetbot came out this year as a pretty full-featured Twitter client, but naturally everybody has their own pet features they would like. The guys at Tapbots have steadily improved the app over the year, adding support for push notifications, muting, Favstar integration, and plenty more. It has since become the best designed and most full featured Twitter client, far exceeding Twitter's iPhone app.

$0.99 - The iPhone has the best camera of any mobile device (and I test a lot of mobile devices). Camera+ has many features that go beyond the included Camera app. The most important ones actually help you take better photos, such as the image stabilizer, which uses the iPhone's gyroscope and only captures a photo when your hands aren't not shaking. The touch up tools are very handy, and the filters look pretty good compared to other photo apps. And a suite of sharing tools help you share your moments with your Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr friends. It's the tool you should reach for when taking photos, and it shows how good a replacement the iPhone can be for a standalone camera.

Best iPhone Games

$0.99 - I'm a sucker for a good physics game, and Super Stickman Golf is a great one. Get the ball into the hole while navigating steep terrain, dodging death traps, and staying under par. With dozens of 9-hole courses and a grab bag of power ups, there is a ton of replayability here. It also includes an exhilarating multiplayer mode which completely changes the mechanics from precision to speed. One of the greatest physics games for iPhone that isn't just another Angry Birds clone.

$0.99 - The form factor of the iPhone lends itself to simpler games over more complex ones. One-tap games like Canabalt are great because of their simplicity. Jetpack Joyride takes this to great lengths, packing a ton of variety into a single tap. And it shows how to do free-to-play games right, in a way that doesn't give an unfair competitive advantage or make you feel forced into spending more money. Gorgeous graphics with a ton of tiny nuance help seal the deal.

Best Mac Apps

Free w/ optional subscription - Spotify combines a cloud-powered streaming music service, a lovely native Mac app, and excellent sharing features into one great app. Though Spotify has been around for awhile, it only recently became available in the US. It lets you combine their huge streamable catalog with music in your iTunes library. It syncs your playlists in the cloud, and copies tracks to your iPhone via Wi-Fi. And it lets you share tracks and playlists, either to one person or the world, quickly and easily. I've ranted before about how I don't like iTunes, and have searched long and far to find a suitable replacement. This year, Spotify became that replacement.

$29.99- Photo-editing tools typically come in one of two favors; way too complicated, or way too simple. Pixelmator bridges the gap by bringing much of the power of Photoshop to mere mortals at an affordable price. While pro designers probably won't drop the Adobe tools for it, it's a fantastic and flexible tool for editing photos. And it has great support for core Mac OS X technologies like Core Image and Auto Save. It's the perfect tool for going beyond red-eye reduction and one-click canned filters to make photos and images look fantastic.

Best Mac Games

$26.95 - Not many games have staying power for me; I typically lose interest in most games after a couple weeks. Not Minecraft. I started playing Minecraft in September of 2010 and have been continually coming back to it ever since. A Lego-style deformable terrain lets you create the world in your image, getting lost in massive caves, and dodging monsters who hunt you down and try to kill you. The game has incredible depth, forcing you to find raw materials and learn how to turn them into weapons, armor, building materials, and so much more. If you've got some friends who play, and one of them is technically savvy, you can set up a multiplayer server where everyone can contribute to the same world, helping each other survive and creating ever-cooler worlds. The 1.0 version, released in November, has a series of objectives and an end-game, though you can happily ignore it and just have fun making your world. You'll spend hours playing Minecraft, and actually have something to show for it after.

$19.99 - One dream that will probably go unrealized in our lifetimes is that of interstellar space travel. We've all wanted to live out battle scenes from Star Wars. Galaxy on Fire 2 is a gorgeous space action game that brings that to life. You can hunt pirates, trade minerals, go on side quests, and hunt down the mysterious race known only as the Voids. A large economy lets you customize your ship to give you the edge in battle, or help you carry more precious resources across the galaxy. A massive story, incredible graphics, great voice acting, tremendous depth, and perfectly-tuned controls make this a must play. It's available on iPhone and iPad, but with so much graphical detail, you'll want to check this one out on the big screen.

Adobe is finally putting an end to Flash Player. They've announced they're stopping development of the mobile Flash Player, which is where the future of tech innovation is heading, and the writing is on the wall for desktop Flash Player as well. This is a good thing for a myriad of reasons, both technical and political.

However, it is important to remember that Flash drove much of the innovation on the web as we know it today. When Flash was conceived over a decade ago, the web was a glimmer of what it is today. Creating something visually impressive and interactive was almost impossible. Flash brought the ability to do animation, sound, video, 3D graphics, and local storage in the browser when nothing else could.

Without Flash, MapQuest would not have been able to provide maps for years before Google did in JavaScript. The juggernaut YouTube would not have been possible until at least 2009, four years after its actual launch. Gaming on the web, which has been around as long as Flash, would only now be possible a decade later. Flash enabled developers to create rich user experiences in a market dominated by slow moving browser developers. Even in 2011 Flash exists to provide those more powerful apps to less tech-savvy people who still use old versions of Internet Explorer.

Flash Player itself seemed like a means to an end. Macromedia, and then Adobe who acquired them, sells the tool that you use to build Flash content. Thus, Adobe's incentive was not to build a great Flash Player, but a pervasive one that would sell its tools. Its technical stagnation provided a market opportunity for browser developers to fill in the gaps that Flash provided. As a result it has a huge market dominance in tools for building rich apps for the web, tools HTML5 lacks.

This puts Adobe in a unique position. As HTML5 continues to negate the need for Flash Player, Adobe has the tools for implementing Flash within HTML5, and the market eager for those tools. Hopefully this move signals that Adobe will be moving in this direction. Because the web DOES need great HTML5 tools for people who aren't savvy in JavaScript, especially for the people who used Flash to do it previously.

HTML5 offers developers the ability to build high-performance, low-power apps and experiences. Browser innovation has never been faster; Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla are all competing to bring the best new features to their browsers in compatible ways. But they're just now filling in many features Flash Player has had for years. Adobe can harness this to help build a better web, and few others can. Hopefully they seize this moment.

iCloud looks like it will be an incredible technology for moving app data between devices. This is inherently a good thing, and it will open avenues for many new types of apps. But, there is a fundamental problem. Right now, the only way to access it is through Objective-C APIs embedded into iOS and Mac OS X. Under the hood, they are obviously talking to the network and doing the business of syncing data, but that networking layer is not exposed or documented, and would have to be reverse-engineered in order to understand and use. So the only way for developers to move their data through this system is through a pre-compiled bundle that gets referenced within an application.

This has a few interesting practical repercussions. If you build an application targeting iCloud, you can only ever put it on two platforms - Mac and iOS. You will never be able to port it to Android, WebOS, Windows Phone, or the web (mobile or desktop). If you sync data through iCloud, And, you will never be able to have a server component that can do things with your data all the time.

Here's some examples of what I'm talking about. In my To Do list app, Todolicious, one thing I would love to be able to do is to push badges to your iPhone and Mac showing the number of To Dos you have left. When you tap a To Do to mark it as done, suddenly all your devices would show the correct number on the icon. With the sync server I was building, this was fairly trivial; wait for the user's list to change, and send a signal to push the count everywhere. But if I back Todolicious with iCloud, I have no way of speaking between my server and iCloud (and I'd still need a server of some kind to send the notifications, after all).

Similarly, if I were to build a web app version of Todolicious (which I was planning on), I could not get access to that data within iCloud at all. I'd have to have either to sync to both iCloud and a custom solution (unwieldy, poor UX and network traffic, and otherwise gross), or not load existing data at all (completely negating the benefit of having such a web app).

So there is a serious ecosystem lock-in problem for apps that wish to target iCloud. All of these problems go away when iCloud is made available as a server-to-server API. A big benefit in the promise of cloud computing includes service interoperability, but right now iCloud is merely a data silo. I have filed this as a bug, rdar://9598555, for a server-to-server API (through which you could build code that speaks to iCloud on your server or on other platforms). I dearly hope Apple addresses it.

Such a server-to-server API would drastically decrease the friction of setting up cloud services to complement an iCloud-backed app, and would lead to better apps and more pleased users.

Two years ago, I began working on a new Twitter client for iPhone, named Streamlines. I hinted at it about a year ago, and has been a driving force in my development of MGTwitterEngine and a ton of open source projects. I've come to the conclusion that I won't have time to finish and release it, as there's still probably another 6 months of development needed to really ship it, and hostility from Twitter and from users of other Twitter clients make effort into building one unsustainable. However, I think there are UI concepts in there which are totally unique and have never been seen before, so I'd like to share them with you before this project is lost to the annals of dead projects.

Here's a video walking through some of the main UI concepts found in Streamlines.

Streamlines is a social networking client that is designed to show you what you want to see, and hide what you don't care about. To do this, it avoids using tab bars and navigation stacks, and instead uses a card interface with a horizontal swipe, similar to the iPhone's Weather app or WebOS' multitasking UI. You pick which timelines you want to see.

On top of that, you can merge multiple timelines together, across all types of timelines, accounts, and services. For example, if you use Lists on Twitter and Facebook to organize, say, your family members, you can create one contiguous timeline which combines both those lists and shows you what your family members are doing, regardless of where they posted it to. Or, you can combine your Twitter followers, mentions, and direct messages together, similar to how Twitterrific works. This saves you time, as it lets you create your own timelines which show you new perspectives on your social networks that you simply can't get with most Twitter clients.

Streamlines tries to make sure you always are looking at the best data, so for every tweet you see on screen, it will update the relative date in real time. So if a tweet is 6 seconds old, it'll update live to say "6s", "7s", "8s", etc. The time is always up to date, so you know how long ago someone actually posted something. Streamlines accounts for API rate limiting, using some advanced heuristics to schedule API requests so that you never run out. This was more a problem two years ago, when you had 30 API requests per hour shared across all your Twitter clients, but still handy. And it handles incoming and outgoing attachments, so if you or someone else embeds content from another site, Streamlines will replace the URL inline with a preview of the image or video.

Under the Hood

Streamlines is backed by two frameworks I wrote, BirdNest and BirdNestUI. They're frameworks because, well, I actually have about 8 apps which use the same Twitter source code, spanning iPhone, iPad, and Mac. This framework tries to encapsulate a lot of functionality - it includes multiple accounts (with credentials stored in the Keychain) spanning multiple services (Twitter and Facebook, with plans to expand into other timeline services like Google Buzz, Foursquare/Gowalla, Yelp, etc.), networking, persistent data, and lots more. It's powered with Core Data and has about 12 open source projects which make up various pieces. The UI framework contains views for showing and creating accounts and timelines, creating tweets or wall posts, and showing timelines in tables (and there's a corresponding UI framework for Mac).

Why Won't It Ship?

There are many reasons. First and foremost, it's at least 6 months out from being released, and that's optimistic. There are lots of bugs, crashes, and UI problems alone, not to mention whole views just not having been built yet. So there's a huge body of work still to be done. I haven't had much opportunity to work on it recently, and there's not much to suggest I'll have more soon.

On top of that, building a Twitter client has become far less appealing than it was two years ago. In those two years, Twitter has drastically increased their feature set to include a TON of things, including geolocation, native retweets, and lists to name a few. The only way to remain competitive is to iterate extremely fast to include every new feature, whenever Twitter announces them. At the same time, Twitter has made several very hostile moves to make it even less appealing to develop on their platform; the most egregious of which was the acquisition of Atebits and their Twitter client Tweetie. There's now such tremendous market saturation for Twitter clients, especially on iPhone. Releasing a new Twitter app now is difficult, as nobody really pays attention to new Twitter clients any more.

Competing with Twitter's free app is hard enough. Even if I could get it to market, there are tons of users who will demand that every feature Twitter offers be crammed into every new release. And everybody's list of must-haves is different; some people will only care about lists, and will rail on you if they can't edit lists. Some will only care about the geolocation feature and if you can put that on a map. Some will only care about native retweets and seeing a list of people who retweeted. Every one of those features, to these users, is a line item on a checklist that needs to exist. To a developer, every one of those features can take weeks or even months to build properly. But every one has to be in there. Oh, and all of those features need to coexist, cleanly, on a small screen, with a fantastic user interface. It is an insanely complex problem to solve.

All of which needs to be built for an app that will not receive much attention, that will be crowded out of the market and will need to be priced cheaply to compensate, and that will be overshadowed by Twitter's own app anyway. There just simply isn't much reason to build a Twitter client anymore. I would much rather spend my time building an app that users will judge for its own merits, not for its completeness in binding to another service.

Going Forward

I'm not sure what to do with Streamlines as it is today. I do think there is a market for niche apps which use Twitter, and I still have some intention of bringing those to market. But I can't say when, and if they ever come, they will not be full Twitter clients.

I'm considering open-sourcing the code, but I'm not convinced of its practicality yet. I'm hesitant to think that someone will want to adopt a monolithic framework for building their own Twitter apps. It's possible they do. But the code is not the cleanest, and there are surely lots of bugs.

That being said, if anyone wishes to build an app with a similar interface, they have my full blessing and encouragement to do it without any permission from or attribution to me needed. I'd like to see more variance in Twitter client UI in general, as the tab bar metaphor is pretty worn at this point.

I would love to hear any and all feedback, positive or negative, either by Twitter or by leaving comments on the YouTube video above. Thanks for watching and reading.

JailbreakMe.com is a website that offers visitors the ability to jailbreak their iPhone without a computer-based tether. It does this by exploiting the system-wide ability for applications to read PDF files, where an incorrectly-formatted PDF file can lead a hacker to do anything they want to your system. While this bug CAN be used maliciously to steal all the personal data from your phone, the developers in this instance used it to enable jailbreaking.

Others will tell you why you should or should not jailbreak your iPhone. Others will decry the developers for bringing to light a serious vulnerability in the iPhone OS. In this blog post, I won't do any of that, but will instead point out some things you should and shouldn't do if you decide to jailbreak.

Backup first, and backup the backup

It should go without saying that, before you start mucking around with the internals of the software on your phone, you should back everything up with iTunes. Sync down all the data into iTunes, and explicitly backup by right-clicking the iPhone in the sidebar and choosing "Back Up". Once that is done, you should backup the actual backup files to somewhere safe. This way, if you ever want to go back to a vanilla iPhone, it's fairly straightforward. The files are located in ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup.

Understand what you're doing

Jailbreaking lets you run apps on your iPhone that, for a variety of political and technical reasons, you could not run otherwise. Apple has gone to great lengths to prevent you from running unauthorized apps on your iPhone, and for several reasons; the most important is for security. Since jailbreaking is designed to let you run those apps, that means that in order for the jailbreak to work, several of those security measures are simply shut off and disabled. This does not mean that you'll automatically get viruses and have your data stolen, but it does open up more avenues for hackers to gain access to your data. You simply must be more vigilant and attentive about security when your phone is jailbroken.

Only add sources that you trust completely

When you jailbreak, you will notice a new app on your home screen, called "Cydia". You can think of this as the jailbroken App Store for your iPhone. You will be able to use this to install lots of apps; you can also install mods that change app icons and fonts, mods that change how apps behave, and mods that add new features system-wide. One way this differs from Apple's built-in App Store is that third parties can publish their own list of apps and mods at their own whim, and users can add those lists to Cydia. You can find lists of third-party sources available by doing some creative Googling.

Now, since you can add any third-party list you want, and those lists can contain mods which can access all of the data on your iPhone, you need to be extremely mindful of which sources you add. Seemingly innocuous apps, such as simple wallpaper lists, can contain code which subtly and sneakily siphons away your contacts, or worse. Since you don't have Apple vetting apps before they hit your phone, you won't be able to trust that an app isn't malicious if it's from an unknown source.

Only install what you need

Many of the apps and mods you can download through Cydia will not be things that you can technically do on the iPhone using Apple's published APIs. An example of this is the project which allows you to install a Growl-like UI for push notifications; it simply is not possible to do through the App Store. This means that you will have mods injecting code into the memory of other apps (sometimes into EVERY app). The more mods like this you have, the more they will start to clash with each other. This can lead to crashes, drained batteries, hangs, and system slowdown. You should consciously try to minimize the number of mods that you install, to preserve the experience of your iPhone.

Be mindful of OpenSSH

Packages in Cydia often times will require use of other libraries to achieve their goals. These needs are called dependencies in Cydia, and they will be listed when you try and install packages. There are packages which will blindly install a package called OpenSSH, which installs a server on your iPhone that allows you to log in via a Terminal. Now, this package uses a file on the iPhone to determine what the default password is, which happens to be 'alpine'. As you can imagine, many people don't change that password by default, and instead just let the default stick and never change it; this led to disaster last year when someone used the default password to extort lazy iPhone jailbreakers.

If you install this package, the absolute first thing you should do is change the root password.

Be wary of iOS software updates

In all likelihood, your iOS software updates will be far more involved than non-jailbreaking. The hacks used to enable jailbreaking are usually patched in the next update of the OS. This means that, if you want to keep your jailbreak mods, you will need to wait for the iPhone dev community to release an updated jailbreak procedure. Sometimes this takes hours, sometimes this takes weeks. Once the jailbreak is released, updating generally consists of backing up everything, restoring your iPhone to the new OS, re-jailbreaking, and reinstalling all of your jailbreak software. It is a far more involved process, on top of the already involved update process of the iOS. You will likely update the OS far less than you would if you were non-jailbroken.

This is hilariously effective. It scrapes a few online lyrics databases and does some analysis to determine the quality of a rhyme. Be sure to check the bottom of the whitepaper for some sample output. Direct PDF link.