TweetDeck, developed by Iain Dodsworth, addresses this problem with the ability to track ten different columns of tweets.  Each is user definable: You can see all the people you follow, replies to you, groups of people you define, Or special purpose things like StockTwits.com or 12seconds.tv.  This week, TweetDeck saw a new update that has added a number of good features that make it even nicer to use, including the ability to translate tweets and a function to email them to people not on Twitter.

TweetDeck requires Adobe AIR to be installed, then the software can be downloaded from the developer’s web site.  It’s available for Mac, Windows and Linux and the developer keeps users up to date on his blog.  It’s currently in beta, but it’s very solid, and used heavily across Twitter.

Update: Cali Lewis has posted an excellent screencast walkthrough of TweetDeck over at GeekBrief.TV. Check it out if you think TweetDeck might be for you.

I tried the guitar lessons first, as that was where I had more experience and felt a bit more comfortable.  The first thing to know is that the basic installation from the iLife ‘09 disc gives one introductory piano lesson and one for guitar.  By connecting to the Lesson Store, you can download eight more lesson for each instrument for free.  “Artist Lessons”, where musicians like John Fogerty, Norah Jones and Sting teach you how to play their songs, are $4.99 each.  The Lesson Store is very basic now, but if this feature takes off, I’d expect to see a lot more offerings here.

Both instruments’ lessons (at least in the early ones I ran through) feature a male instructor named Tim who walks you through the basics. The lessons are in video form with integrated animated images depicting music notation and the keyboard or finger board.  The general feel is very similar to the promo videos Apple creates to demonstrate a new product.  The lesson is broken into several parts and there is a “cycle” option that allows the student to set a part of the video to repeat until the skill is mastered.  The video can also be slowed down, if it’s too hard to keep up with the pace of the music at full speed.

The one element that I wasn’t impressed by was the built-in guitar tuning feature.  Before beginning, I had tuned with an external electronic tuner.  The principal is that you play a certain string, and adjust the tuning key until a needle on the face of the device is straight in the middle of its scale. Once I started the first guitar lesson, I learned there was a built-in feature that essentially worked the same way.  Except it didn’t really work. On some strings it would show way too low, then way too high, with only the slightest change made in between.  Other strings seemed to tune okay, except the end result was very off key and a bit painful to hear.  I wound up having to retune with the external tuner.  I’m not sure what went wrong, but I suppose the tuner function is very dependent on the computer’s mic (I was using the  internal mic on my MacBook Pro), and the guitar’s angle and proximity to the pickup.  I very much like the idea of an software-intgrated tuner, but it just didn’t work out for me.

Everything else, though was really quite impressive.  I’m even inspired to stick with the lessons and try to get back to the guitar after two decades away.

The question most people are interested in hearing about is, how good is the facial recognition? In a lot of cases, really good.  But the farther the angle strays from straight on, the tougher a time the software has.  On the same person, if given a straight on shot, it did quite well.  It even did reasonably well identifying a face on a quarter-turn left or right.  It has real problems with profiles.  I taught it several almost identical shots of the same face in profile, but it could not apply that to other profile shots of the same person taken at the same time.  It seems to have a strong sense that two eyes (open or closed) are required for a face.

A person wearing glasses can also give some false matches as the software identifies other people also wearing glasses with the bespectacled face it has learned.

This should not be taken as a panning of the functionality.  Given what’s being attempted, the success rate is very, very good. So good, that it’s easy to forget what a tricky thing is being done, causing expectation of more nearly perfect results.  For a first generation of this feature in iPhoto, I’m very impressed.

In iPhoto, the new “Faces” feature will recognize a face when you link it with a name and will associate that name to the same face in any future images, making visual searching of photos possible. “Places” offers searches of locations using geotagging entered by GPS-enabled gear like the iPhone or Eye-Fi cards.  Manual tagging is also possible for non-GPS enhanced photos.

Enhancements to iMovie include the ability to separate video from audio and move them through your project independently, a set of new special effects, and a nice map feature that adds 2-D or 3-D maps to travel-related videos.

GarageBand adds an interesting new aspect in that it will actually provide basic lessons for guitar and piano, taught by artists such as Sting, John Fogarty and Norah Jones.  So even if your musical skills are limited or non-existent, you can learn a little something and create some music with GarageBand

The new iLife 09 ships in late-January, priced at $79 for  single-seat license, or $99 for a family pack.

In the world of iWork 09, Apple is introducing Keynote Remote, an iPhone/iPod Touch app that allows remote control of presentations.  Also new charts and templates for Numbers.  The iWork package is also $79 single-seat, and $99 for a family pack, shipping immediately.

Google Docs, with its collaborative, cloud-based productivity software has inspired the online, iWork.com, launching today.  You can edit docs online, as with the Google offering.

In hardware, a 17″ MacBook Pro was announced that uses the same uni-body construction that was rolled out for the 15″ model last year.  The display is 1920 x 1200 resolution and offers an anti-glare option (something many people have been clamoring after).  Ports are one Firewire 800 and three USB.  Maximum RAM is now doubled at 8 GB.  Of course, it also has the glass trackpad of the smaller MackBook Pro.  Probably most impressive is the battery life: A promised eight hours, absolutely unheard of for a laptop battery prior to this.  The downside is that the battery is not removable.  The new system starts shipping in late January with a base price of $2799.

Apple’s iTunes Music Store will offer a three-tier pricing structure, with songs available at 69 cents, 99 cents, and $1.29.  In the iTunes Plus tier ($1.29), 8 million songs are now offered DRM-free and by the end of the quarter, all 10 million songs will be available without DRM.  Also starting today you can buy music on your iPhone across a 3G network, rather than just Wi-Fi.

I’ll be back later with more news and products from the Macworld Expo floor.  Thanks for reading and stay tuned!

If you’re unfamiliar with Twitter, here are the basics: Posts (“tweets” in Twitter-speak) are limited to 140 characters. There is a public timeline where all tweets appear (unless their author has opted out), and a personal timeline for each user. In the personal timeline, the tweets of all the people/entities that the user has chosen to follow are displayed chronologically. Finally, there are two basic kinds of tweets: Original and replies (which are preceded by an @ and the user name the reply is directed toward).

Some people use Twitter as a one-way broadcast, telling the world what they are doing and sometimes promoting their projects. They often don’t follow anyone. Others mix in an occasional reply or brief back-and-forth conversation. And some people use it for extended conversations, in the style of an instant messaging client.

This can cause a problem, as Twitter displays tweets in sequential screens, and if you follow someone who tweets a great deal (replies or originals) they can quickly obscure the people you’re trying to follow. An example here is the useful, but highly prolific and often repetitive Engadget feed:

As you can see, poor iJustine is getting buried in gadget news. You then must decide whether to “un-follow” the verbose tweeter, track them separately, such as bookmarking their timeline, but keeping them out of your own, or just resign yourself to having to go through many pages of their tweets in order to see everyone else’s.

My solution involves the excellent browser Flock. I started using Flock back in December after it was covered on Mahalo Daily. Besides being a solid, stable piece of software (high praise in the browser world), Flock adds in features designed to compliment social networking sites like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. Flock features a sidebar that appears to the left of the browsing window. Configured to display Twitter, it looks something like this:

Your most recent tweet shows at the top against a gray background, then all the people you follow display, ordered by how recently they’ve posted an update. If new updates from other users occur, they are displayed automatically at the top, nearly live (I’ve seen a three or four minute lag between when a tweet is posted on Twitter and when it refreshes in the sidebar.)

This provides a clean, clear view of people you’re interested in, while not letting any single user display more than one tweet at a time. Only their most recent one shows. If I see something I want to follow up, I go to a browser tab I keep loaded with my Twitter home page (which can be loaded by clicking the word “Twitter” at the top of the sidebar). Clicking on any user’s name in the display will take you to their personal timeline in a browser window. Using Flock like this requires very minimal setup, just logging in once to your Twitter account through an interface provided by Flock. If you don’t log out again, it will remember you and open correctly each time you launch the browser.

Flock is available for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. If you’re interested in seeing what I talk about when I’m not blogging here, you can follow me at twitter.com/davepeterson. And thanks to Neal Campbell for suggesting I turn a short comment I left on his blog into this post.

I think there are three main obstacles to moving applications from the desktop to “the cloud”, and they’re all network-centric ones.  First is availability of a network connection: depending on how and where you use the application, this may or may not be much of an issue, but anyone who travels with a laptop or smaller computing device will get it. Even if we can’t connect to the net, we want to be able to do something.  In December 2006, there was a snow storm in the Seattle area that put out power for a lot of people for several days, and in many residential areas, the major provider of broadband connectivity was out for a week after power came back. Second, is speed. For people to feel comfortable shifting their daily use software to a remote server the speed to load and interact with the application will have to be comparable to what they experience with a local hard drive.  Finally, security will have to be on a par with what is used for online financial transactions today. Another interesting thing to consider is how this style of providing software will be priced.  Some apps may be free and advertiser supported, but most regular users probably won’t want banner ads surrounding their work.  A monthly or annual subscription scheme?  Or something that meters use and bills accordingly.  Will it be like the cable bill or the power bill?

In spite of (or because of, depending on your viewpoint) all these factors, application deployment is moving to the web.  Software on physical (and local) disc, whether movies, music, or word processing programs is starting to fade out.  In retrospect, keeping everything local seems more like a technological inheritance from the old unconnected world of stand-alone beige boxes than anything that would have been chosen if viable alternatives were available.  Now they are becoming available and the patchwork conversion begins.