We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software. We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others. However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software. Developers will receive a new agreement without an NDA covering released software within a week or so. Please note that unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released. Thanks to everyone who provided us constructive feedback on this matter.

Ah, this is a good day. :)

TweetDeck

The deck idea is cool, but I’m a minimalist, and even when you collapse the decks down to a single column, it’s still too big for me. I do really like the search feature, along with being able to group your followees, and of the three clients, TweetDeck was fastest on the updates. It’s an AIR app, by the way. There didn’t seem to be too much of a footprint other than in screen real estate, which helped. I like my Twitter apps slim and lean. The reply/d/r/f buttons didn’t really do it for me, though, and while the typography wasn’t bad, it still wasn’t great. Too much information.

twhirl

Also an AIR app. It’s smaller than TweetDeck and has support for multiple accounts, both of which are nice. But there were just way too many buttons. That killed it for me. Too much noise, too many options, not enough hierarchy to show me which ones are important and which aren’t. Bzzt. I didn’t really care for the typography at all — too messy.

Twitterrific

And we come to the final contender, which I’ve been using since I got serious with Twitter. Twitterrific is the smallest of the three (screen-wise) and the cleanest and simplest. Sure, you can’t do everything you can from the others (or from the website), but that’s okay. Twitter is small by nature (140 characters and all) and Twitterrific feels like it fits that mentality the best. It also has the best typography, in my opinion — clean and clear. I don’t really need to know when the tweet was or where it came from. I really just don’t care.

My three beefs with Twitterrific, however, are that (1) the “What are you doing?” entry box is so small that you can only see part of your tweet at a time, (2) updates sometimes take a little while to show up, and (3) you can only use one Twitter account at a time. You really need to be able to see your whole tweet at once, especially when you hit the 140-character limit and need to rewrite. And when you’ve got multiple Twitter accounts, it isn’t fun having to log out and log in again each time.

In spite of these three issues, Twitterrific is still my favorite, and I’m standing by it. (And hoping they’ll fix the problems. :)) I’ve got it on my iPhone as well. It’s small, simple, and fast (other than the updates), and it fits me like a glove. Vive la Twitterrific. ;)

But I didn’t.

Then a few years ago I converted to Mac and — to my surprise — gladly gave up the ability to customize everything. See, sometimes it’s really nice to have only a few options available to you. Makes the decision easier. Being confronted with a vast array of possibilities is staggering and overwhelming, not to mention stressful.

And so in the past few years I’ve become very much a fan of minimalism, sacrificing a horde of options so that the few that remain aren’t lost in the crowd, so that they’re easy to use. Simple.

Sure, this doesn’t always work, but if you can provide for 80% of the scenarios with a fraction of the features you could add, go for the 80%. Forget the other 20% — somebody else can meet their needs. Trying to be everything to everyone just doesn’t work.

Why am I starting a new blog? I work as a web designer but until now haven’t had a good place to write about design-related stuff. (I’ve cycled through a number of blogs that ostensibly had that as their goal, but none really felt like the right place, and so I rarely posted on them.) Enter Halfpence. It’ll be a design and technology blog, covering web/graphic/book design, Mac and iPhone goodness, and anything else geeky or technological that strikes my fancy.

Here we go…