I was delighted to be invited by Mark from Everyday Mac Support onto Not Another Mac Podcast — and the episode has now been published.

Mark, Glenn Künzler of MacTrast.com and myself discussed several post-WWDC topics, MacDefender and the Mac security landscape, iCloud and user control, the new iTunes Match and iTunes in the cloud features, the revamped ‘Apple Store 2.0’ experience, rumours about the Apple A5 chip in the MacBook Air and more.

You can take a listen to Episode 8 on the Your Mac Network site and also subscribe to the show in iTunes.

Thanks again to Mark for inviting me on the show. Mark and Dennis are always looking for other contributors on their show, even if you are not a seasoned podcaster. Please do go over to the site or contact them via @YourMacNetwork on Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible or by email if you think you might be interested.

• All the iOS devices — iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, are built around Cocoa Touch.
• Snow Leopard brought 64-bit support to the Mac mainstream for Cocoa applications. Carbon applications are clearly on the way out and have been since the release of Leopard in 2007.
• The third major release of iTunes since Leopard came out is still Carbon and still only 32-bit. (Perhaps an even greater irony is that there is a 64-bit Windows version of iTunes.)

Is this a bit of a nitpick? Probably. Does it really matter what the framework underneath iTunes is if it is being improved? Possibly not. Is iTunes a huge, vital part of Apple’s iPod/iPhone/iTunes Store infrastructure that they are naturally unwilling to make huge changes to? Absolutely.

But I really, really wanted iTunes 10 to be ‘iTunes X’ — not just another major release with some new features, but a drastic rewrite of the application (for the Mac anyway) in Cocoa. The app’s performance has been improved with recent versions, but iTunes is still the one application that ships with Macs that feels out of place — the interface is jarring and not fluid, the app frequently hangs for several seconds for no reason and there is ancient UI debris hanging around. (Those first two might be better with this release, I don’t know, but the Mac OS 9-style context menu cursor lives on.)

Ah well, maybe iTunes 11? 🙁

I just wrote a review of Tweetie 2 for iPhone OS on the App Store. I republish it here; I’m extremely impressed with the new release.

Tweetie 2 has an impressive feature set, including retweeting, image and video (3GS only) uploading and almost every built-in Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible feature that is exposed by the API.

The real star of the show here, however, is the interface. It feels iPhone-native and intuitive while also introducing some innovative features such as the flick-to-reload mechanism. The app’s simplicity isn’t hampered by the sheer volume of functions and features — things are kept out of the way until and unless you want access to them.

I’m not a fan of the somewhat bland icon, but otherwise I can’t fault this beautiful little app.

You may be reluctant to pay for a Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible app, even at £1.79 — but if you appreciate great UI, you really should consider it.

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