Yes, it is a good feeling. My iTunes music is now all free of DRM…..finally! FREE at last! Just tonight, I upgraded the last batch of my songs to iTunes Plus (no DRM). I’m more likely to buy from the iTMS now than I was a couple of months ago. I had been using the Amazon MP3 Store exclusively. Heck, I may still continue to use them exclusively since their tracks are much better quality. Nonetheless, kudos to Apple for finally realizing that DRM must die, even though I had to pay extra to get there!

DRM-Free

I just downloaded another Twitter iPhone app called Tweetie. I had been using Twitterrific for a while and really like it but decided to buy this app ($2.99) and try it. So far, I’m quite happy with it and although this is just my second day using it, Tweetie may end up replacing Twitterrific as my primary Twitter iPhone app.

There are some UI subtleties that Tweetie has that I like quite a bit, one being the ability to swipe your finger from left to right on a tweet. Doing this gives you a menu allowing you to reply, mark as favorite or see the user info (as seen in the picture below).

I also like that Tweetie allows me to just see the @replies which otherwise I may have missed if I haven’t checked Twitter in a while. You can post Twitpics directly from the client, something that Twitterrific also has, so there is no edge there.

For now, I’ll keep enjoying the app that’s quickly becoming my fav Twitter client on the iPhone……well, unless someone comes up with a better app

Gmail has pushed a new feature for its email service called Offline Gmail. It basically lets you cache your emails locally on your computer using Google Gears thus providing you with access to your mail even when not connected to the internet. This can be very handy in many situations. One that I can think of is while on a plane with no internet access, you can still compose new messages, play catch up on unread messages, and best of all, you can search your entire email database!

As it stands now, the feature is being pushed to Gmail users in phases so if you don’t have it yet, don’t despair, it will arrive hopefully sooner rather than later. If you are one of the lucky ones that already have the option (like moi), it can easily be activated from Settings>Labs>Offline Gmail. After this you will see the “Offline” option and you can click there and install. Pretty easy, though if you have a lot of emails it may take a while.

Pretty neat Google, pretty neat!

The fine folks at Apple have released firmware update 2.2.1 for the iPhone to address some bug fixes and functionality. Since yours truly’s iPhone is jailbroken, I don’t think I will go through the trouble of losing my Cydia apps and reinstalling them. Apple has yet to make good on their promise to deliver background push notifications to allow third-party apps to run in the background. At the moment I get this functionality (well, sort of) with an app called Backgrounder, found in the Cydia repository.

So the waiting game for this feature from Apple continues. They promised to deliver it in September, but maybe they meant September 2009? I’m getting really annoyed at the fact that they continue to ignore this and hope that people forget about it and try to sweep it under the rug!

I guess we’ll have to wait for firmware 3.0 to get this. Hey, hope is the last thing we should lose, right?

OH, APPLE, AND BY THE WAY, WHERE IS THE COPY/PASTE?

I have been using Twitter lately a whole lot more than I had before, in part because I primarily did most of my social networking at Jaiku. However, I have been getting much more comfortable with using Twitter as my primary socnet but only using the service through the website when at the computer was not cutting it for me. I use Twitterrific on the iPhone and it’s excellent but needed to find a desktop client to manage the service. Enter TweetDeck, an Adobe Air desktop application.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck has quickly become my best friend when I want to “tweet” at my computer, be it at work or at home. It allows you to have different columns and have a quick snapshot of the most recent tweets by the people you follow, @replies to you and direct messages. It also allows you to create groups for your contacts, if you so desire, as well as uploading twitpics (pictures). It really is a winner in my book and very simple to use. I recommend it to anyone who uses Twitter and is looking for a desktop app to manage it effectively.

Beware: Twittering can be quite addictive