Echofon
While at times it can be a distraction, Twitter has become a valuable resource in my development process over the last couple of years, allowing me to take part in a great community of web and ExpressionEngine developers spread across the globe. I’ve never really used the Twitter website to keep track of conversations, though, preferring from the start to use a desktop client. While I’ve experimented with many, the one that’s stuck is Echofon for Mac.
I’ve stayed with Echofon for a number of reasons, most notably for its ability to sync between desktop and iPad clients. As a result, I can view my timeline from Echofon for iPad and when I return to my Mac, I’ll see exactly where I left off reading (and vice versa). Echofon also has a great conversation view — you just click on the little speech bubble and Echofon brings up the entire list of related tweets. Another handy feature is Echofon’s ability to autofill usernames. Start typing the name of someone you follow then press the Tab key — voila!
The only thing I miss from Echofon is filtering — I’d love to be able to remove tweets from my timeline containing certain words, for example. Overall, though, Echofon is a great app and I highly recommend it for Mac and iPad owners.
Mountee
Mountee is a new Mac app for those who use ExpressionEngine 2 (EE). Essentially, Mountee let’s you mount your EE templates as files so that you can edit them via your favourite editor instead of from within the EE control panel.
Prior to release, I didn’t see how Mountee was different from ExpanDrive or Transmit’s “Mount as Disk” feature, other than Mountee would also allow you to change template preferences without going into EE’s control panel. Now, however, I can see why Mountee is such a big deal: It doesn’t save templates as files at all. Not only is this better for performance (sites with a lot of traffic can perform more slowly when templates are saved as files), but it still allows you to use EE’s native template versioning.
I’ve only tested Mountee a little on my local machine, so I don’t know if there are any bugs or performance issues, but I can definitely see it making my transition from EE1 to EE2 much easier.