Twitterific is a great little Twitter client for Mac OS X. The software is free if you don’t mind seeing an ad once an hour. They show up in the same space as the “tweets” and can be skipped or ignored very easily. If you don’t like the ads, you can register the software for $15. It’s a good deal all around.

Some idiot unhappy person, however, has posted a hack that strips out the ads. People who use this hack are stealing money from the Icon Factory: they didn’t pay for the software, and they’re not showing the ads.

In response, I just registered my copy two copies, one for me and one for my wife. They now have my our $15~$30.

The idiot gentleman who posted the hack is defending himself, as if he didn’t do anything wrong. Here’s how we (all Twitterific users, especially software developers) should respond:

• Register your copy of Twitterific for $15
• Post a note on the idiot’s site to let him know that, to prove him wrong, you’ve just registered your copy (here’s mine).
• Post something on your own weblog. Either point here, or reproduce something like these instructions.

Let’s see if we can drum up at least a few hundred registrations for them, to show our support. Turn the idiot’s bad behavior into something good for the Icon Factory.

Oranged.net has released version 5 of their freelance business management software Studiometry. In version 5, it looks like they have added a new coat of paint and that’s about it. Oh, and they raised the price again. iCal synching, which they promised me would be implemented in Studiometry 4.1 has yet to see a proper implementation.

Someone should tell the Oranged folks that for Studiometry to continue to be viable, it is going to have to be rewritten from the ground up in Cocoa. The more I see from these guys, the more I want to chalk up my $169.95 (It costs $209.95 now.) to a learning experience and wash my hands of this wretched app.

P.S. iRatchet, Billings, if you had more robust invoice numbering ability, I would buy your app in a heartbeat. Look at the capabilities in Studiometry; it can’t be hard if they managed to do it.

Microsoft offers new peek at Office 2008 updates: “After months of remaining low-key about its next major update to Office 2008, Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit has returned to the public eye with details of important new updates to the production suite.”

(Via AppleInsider.)

1. OmniWeb doesn’t behave with my bank’s website.

   I use ING Direct for my bank, and they have a login system that sort of makes me not care if I see how much money I have. First, enter customer number. Second, answer two security questions. Third, verify login images and phrase. Fourth, click the numbers or enter the corresponding characters for your PIN. ING offers the option of “registering” a computer so that the security questions don’t show up. OmniWeb can’t seem to understand this, so I’m stuck with one more step than I need to have in my login routine.

2. OmniWeb doesn’t handle desired popups correctly.

   I like the popup Ma.gnolia bookmarklet. In OmniWeb, even with “Only when not requested” in OmniWeb > Preferences > Ad Blocking, it still opens in a new tab. If I invoke a bookmarklet, that means I requested the popup! Other bookmarklets behave similarly.

3. OmniWeb doesn’t have a progress indicator.

   I like to see the loading progress of the page I’m visiting, particularly if it’s moving slowly. Helpful to see if it’s just a large amount to load or if it’s not making progress at all. Saves me time and frustration.

4. OmniWeb’s Tab System

   I don’t like OmniWeb’s tab system. Displaying the tabs in a sidebar is somewhat cool, but moving tabs to a vertical orientation apparently necessitated Omni’s change of keyboard tab navigation so that command+up/down arrow switches to a new tab. I have used this same key combination in browsers since I can remember to jump to the top or bottom of a page. I keep trying this in OmniWeb, and it’s jarring when I go to a new tab instead of what I expect. It usually takes me a few seconds, too, to figure out what happened because the content of the viewport did indeed change, but not as I expected.

5. OmniWeb’s Autofill Functionality Is Flaky at Best

   When I come across a form in Safari, I can type in the first thing they ask for and as long as it’s a pretty standard form, Safari happily populates the fields, and the data is rarely incorrect. When it is, it’s just a couple places. Contrast this with OmniWeb. When I go to a website, if I want to autofill a form, I have to click a small icon at the bottom right of the window. And even then, it might not fill any of the fields. For instance, I just tried it on the Barnes & Noble checkout page, and it wouldn’t autofill.

OmniWeb is a nice looking app with some features that are missing from the shipping version of Safari. (Here’s hoping Safari 3 in Leopard is much improved.) But, Saft steps up to the plate and fills those gaps at a lower price than OmniWeb. (Unless you bought it on sale like I did when I got my family pack for $9.95.) What Omni has to realize is that if you are going to ask people to pay for a browser, it has to be light years ahead of the free alternatives. And with Safari being serviceable for most users and Firefox being so extensible there’s really very little it couldn’t do with the right coaxing, Omni will have to either innovate like crazy to make OmniWeb irresistible or give up trying to charge for a web browser like Opera did.