Wow. It has been over a year since our last post here, and since then, a lot has changed. After our editors entered high school, writing for Twek wasn’t a priority anymore. Yet our post on iWork vs. Office seems to have the number one spot in Google search results and gets a consistent 100+ views per day.

But all good things must come to an end. Twek will no longer be maintained, and all current posts and comments will be frozen in place for posterity. For fresh, new content, we recommend Daring Fireball, MacStories, Techmeme, The Brooks Review, and The Verge.

Of course, we’re still active on Twitter. You can follow @kevinchen or @daylenyang for random daily ramblings.

With that out of the way, it’s finally time to say goodbye. Farewell!

I never imagined this set of problems when I joined Facebook back in 2006, while a journalism graduate student. A friend had posted some photos from a class barbeque. It sounded like the next Friendster or MySpace — the latest social-networking fad, not something that was destined to reshape the Internet. I simply saw it as a way to deepen new friendships.

In the ensuing years it also became about rekindling old friendships (or feeling smug about avoiding the same), promoting my work as a journalist, and showing loyalty to media outlets, causes, and yes, even brands. But somewhere in that transition from a social site meant to deepen interpersonal relationships to a self promotional, commercial tool, Facebook lost its appeal. The various facets of my life merged into a web of connectivity where I could no longer clearly create distinct relationships with friends, foes, and fast food — either because I can’t figure out how or because Facebook is preventing me outright. For me, the overwhelming connectivity to everyone and everything, without much control over those ties, feels like I’m no longer connected to anything, and meanwhile, outside groups benefit.

You can read the whole thing here. Follow @FacebookProtest on Twitter and commit to not logging into Facebook on June 6, 2010.

1. I like new stuff. I want to be able to jump on the latest firmware as soon as it goes live. I don’t like waiting for the Dev Team to find a new workaround every time.
2. I want complete backups. I want iTunes to back everything up, every single time. When you jailbreak and sync, your mods aren’t backed up. Since iTunes (on my computer, at least) is constantly crashing and stores data like a sieve stores sand, I need as many safeguards as I can get for my data. Also, switching devices (if I ever get a new iPod) will be a major pain.
3. I hate lag. I’ve seen iPhones where you have to wait 30 seconds before the Phone app opens.
4. Backgrounder? See previous reason. Besides, my iPod barely handles a single app at a time.
5. Apple does it better. Copy and paste and multitasking, anyone?
6. I hate bugs. When something goes wrong on my clean iPod touch, I know who to blame: Apple. And I know who to call: Apple. After you jailbreak and install a bunch of unofficial plugins, patches, hacks, and software, who knows what went wrong?
7. SBSettings? I don’t need to change my brightness every 30 seconds. I don’t find entertainment in swiping the Wi-Fi switch across the screen. Do you?
8. I want a polished UI. It certainly feels like most of the people writing Cydia apps specialize in command prompts, not GUI design.
9. Who needs Cydia? Maybe jailbreaking was fun and thrilling in the pre-2.0 days, but with the App Store, I can get pretty much anything I could possible need or want — sans Wobble iBoobs.
10. I like developers. Why should I pirate apps if it doesn’t support the people who invest their time and money into making great software?

What are your top reasons to jailbreak / not to jailbreak? Share them with us in the comments.

P.S. “Hey, look! I can listen to Pandora, Last.fm, and my the music app with this ugly chrome skin while watching YouTube, surfing the web, changing my screen brightness, downloading 1,000 pirated fart applications, and applying a new theme with colors that are so badly matched they’ll burn your eyes out — all at the same time! And my battery lasts up to 15 minutes!”

Tweetie

Just as Tweetie 2 is the best Twitter client for the iPhone, Tweetie is the best Twitter client for Mac. Tweetie is deceptively simple yet extremely powerful.

Cyberduck

Cyberduck is a simple, fast FTP and SSH client. It’s great for SSHing into an iPhone or iPod Touch or FTPing into your own server.

uTorrent

uTorrent is a small, fast BitTorrent client.

ThemePark

Ever wish you could replace Mac OS X’s Aqua theme? With ThemePark and Aqua Inspiriat, you can. Head over to MacStories for the full installation instructions.

Dropbox

Dropbox is software that syncs your files online and across your computers. Put your files into your Dropbox on one computer, and they’ll be instantly available on any of your other computers that you’ve installed Dropbox on (Windows, Mac, and Linux too!) Because a copy of your files are stored on Dropbox’s secure servers, you can also access them from any computer or mobile device using the Dropbox website.

Image credit: Apple

It’s finally here and official — the Apple tablet. Dubbed the iPad, this thingamajig runs a scaled-up iPhone OS on a custom 1 GHz CPU.

• Runs all iPhone apps
• 9.7 inch multi-touch display
• 0.5 inches thick, 1.5 pounds
• Uses Apple 30-pin Dock Connector
• Humongous on-screen keyboard
• Runs modified version of iWork
• 10-hour battery
• 16-64 GB storage
• Optional wireless with AT&T
• Optional docking station with keyboard

Talking to some teachers, they’d definitely like something like this in the classroom. The question is, can they afford it? And for the regular consumer, is there really that much space between smartphone and computer for this device?

Head over to the Gdgt liveblog for all the juicy details!

Around the Interwebs

Gdgt (our top pick: they have all the photos and automatic updating)
Ars Technica
MacStories
Technologizer
Computerworld

On Twitter

@storiesofmac
@macrumors
@brian_tong

(This is kind of a last minute post)

Enter keyboardr. It’s a simple web app by Julius Eckert and Udschal Imanov. Visiting keyboardr.com reveals a clean, white homepage with a single box at the top, a giant clock underneath it, and several links in the corner. When you type into the search box, keyboardr searches through Google Web, Google Images, Wikipedia, and YouTube and puts all of the results on a keyboard navigation-friendly page. Searching is live, so keyboardr will return search results as you type queries in without forcing you to keep on clicking the Search button. You can navigate around the results with your arrow key and open items by hitting Enter.

In my opinion, keyboardr is search as it should be. Google, Yahoo!, and Bing still direct you to another page after you press Enter. If you don’t get the results you want, you have to go to yet another page. And another one. And another one after that. You don’t get to see how the results change as you change your query, a powerful feature of keyboardr.

If you want the latest and greatest in keyboardr, bookmark keyboardr.com/nightly instead. This is the nightly build of keyboardr which has many useful features such as a settings page where you can change what results are displayed and some other tweaks like 12-hour time.

Try it out!

Image credit: Apple

January 19, 2009

Dear Mr. Jobs:

I have been looking into buying a MacBook Pro. After doing some research on the laptop, I uncovered some evidence [http://mantia.me/blog/macbook-pro-thousands-of-colors/] that it does not have support for “millions of colors” as stated on the Apple website. Instead, the MacBook Pro displays are supposedly only capable of 6 bits per channel, or 18 bits per pixel. This is only 2¹⁸ colors, or 262,144.

I chatted with some “experts” on the Apple Store website. The first two repeated that it was “millions of colors,” but avoided my question when I asked how many bits per channel. The next expert stopped replying when I asked her about the color depth, and the fourth one did the same. The fifth expert, Melissa C., told me it was indeed 6 bits per channel. Here is the conversation I had, as copied and pasted from the chat window:

So, the rumors are accurate. The MacBook Pro’s display is only capable of 6 bits per channel. A million is way bigger than 262,144. Even my cheap Compaq FP7317 that I bought nearly six years ago when LCD was considered relatively new can display 8-bit color, or 16,777,216 colors [http://www.lcdnfo.com/html/Compaq__FP7317-lcd-monitor.html].

I admire Apple’s hardware, which is why I want to get a Mac. However, I also like honesty and truth in advertising. In the honesty section, Apple has failed. Terribly.

It all comes down to this: either the technicians, experts, display specialists, and all the websites of the manufacturers from which Apple buys its displays are wrong, or Apple is misinforming its customers about the specs.

I don’t understand why I had to talk to five experts before finding an answer. Why can’t Apple equip its employees with information? Or, why can’t Apple just write it on the website? It only takes 5 characters to do so: “6-bit.” As a customer, I just want to make an informed decision when I make a big purchase, and to do that, I need information. But Apple seems determined to keep that information out of customers’ hands.

Thanks for your time in reading this letter. You probably will not respond because you have other more important things to tend to, like the Apple Tablet (which will hopefully actually be capable of millions of colors).

Sincerely,

Kevin Chen

What do you think the paint splats mean? Obviously the Tablet will support 3D gestures — you'll be able to throw paint at it.

[via MacStories via Engadget and Ars Technica]

Update: The event will be held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on Wednesday, January 27th. It will begin at 10 AM Pacific Time. And there could be other things too, according to Ars Technica:

That’s about the only semi-solid piece of information about the Apple tablet, though—other rumors have included the possibility of Verizon being involved, a new SDK and tablet “simulator” for developers, “unexpected” UI features, and more. Some expect the tablet to be heavily aimed at promoting the publishing industry and e-books, though others suspect that it will be more geared towards visual artists and music/video consumption.

And gdgt has a liveblog set up and ready to go.

Update 2: And this tablet thing has been going on since at least June.

Update 3: Here’s the full invite.

Saw this on The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs the other day. Is this where Google is headed with their Nexus One? *shudder* In related news…

[The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs via Solipsism via suchosch on Flickr]