Reilly2040's Blog

Well, NBC has released their 2009/2010 schedule, and its grim reading.

It was pretty well known that with the economic situation taking a heavy toll on advertising, and NBC’s new deal with Jay Leno that the axe was going to be falling pretty heavily on other shows to free up money and space in the schedules, but still, a lot of favourite shows have fallen.

From this blog’s point of view, Knight Rider is chief among them. Although not entirely unexpected, its still disheartening to see the show cut down just as it had found its feet and was turning in some sterling, entertaining episodes.  However, there’s currently a campaign on Twitter being started to try and build interest in the show and see if it can be brought back.  So if you’re on Twitter, follow @savekitt and check out the #savekitt hashtag.

Its especially sad to see NBC wielding the axe just as Knight Rider has been launched in the UK and has been doing phenominally well.  The feature length pilot netted a half a million viewers, Sci Fi UK’s highest ratings since its first run of Heroes in 2007.   However this week, the combination of Knight Rider and Dollhouse proved to be a winner, and Knight Rider smashed that total, bringing in a whopping 700,000 viewers.   With the show doing so well over here it’ll be a huge shame if there’s no season two.

So please check out http://www.twitter.com/savekitt and maybe if we get insanely lucky there’ll be enough international interest to resurrect the show.

And while I’m here, check out http://twitter.com/EarlTwitition as the excellent My Name is Earl has also been axed by NBC.

When I first got my Blackberry, one of the first orders of business was to get a Twitter client installed.

The obvious choice was Twitterberry. It had a nice GUI interface, and was easy to download and use. However, since then a couple of new clients have arrived on the market. SocialScope is currently in a closed beta, so I’ve not been able to try it, but everyone’s raving about it.

However, ÜberTwitter burst onto the scene a short while ago with a public beta of their new client. I wasn’t able to use the initial betas, as I’m on BIS, and applying different TCP settings would take me outwith my unlimited data tarrif.

However last week saw the release of the latest beta, which now supports BIS, meaning I can have a proper play.

To say I’m impressed would be an understatement.  I do feel some loyalty to Twitterberry, as it was the first client I used, and its completely free (once out of Beta, ÜberTwitter is planning free and paid-for editions), however there’s just no denying that ÜberTwitter’s feature set blows Twitterberry out of the water, even if you compare it to the latest Twitterberry Betas (which I’ve also got installed).

While I’m not big on the location updating services built into ÜberTwitter (its just not something I’m interested in), the rest of the features are great.  The timeline view is nice, sending new tweets is snappy (something that’s slowed down noticably in the latest Twitterberry betas), it supports clickable hashtags, has inline thumbnails for Twitpic (and various others) and it supports searching twitter from within the app.

The last one especially, I really love.  Previously I was doing all my Twitter searches from the website, but the ability to do them, or follow hashtags straight from my Twitter application I find incredibly useful.

Its not perfect.  Its pretty well known that if you leave ÜberTwitter running, constantly polling for new tweets, it suffers from memory leaks, and will happily munch through your battery, but then, it is only in beta.  

I can’t wait to see what else they add over the course of the beta, and I think its safe to say I’ll happily pay them for a pro version when they go for a final release.  There’s no doubt that this is a great, feature-rich, professional-looking client.