Ah, yes, another blog post about TweetDeck.

As of yesterday, Twitter’s rumored to go through with a $40-50 million acquisition of TweetDeck.

While this makes sense considering Twitter’s position on having more control over their third-party ecosystem, it’ll be interesting to see how they’ll handle the extreme split in user experience between TweetDeck and Twitter for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. As an idealistic user, I hope they’ll split the two clients into “Twitter for Mac” and “Twitter Pro for Mac”, although it’ll still be pretty disjointed – Twitter for Mac is only for one platform, and TweetDeck runs on both Windows and OS X. Not to mention how Twitter’ll feel about the dependency of Adobe AIR.

The rumor‘s also been thrown around that Twitter made the acquisition simply to shut down TweetDeck. If that ended up going through, that’d show a complete disregard for users, not to mention all the brands that have TweetDeck firmly integrated into their marketing processes. And that’s a pretty hefty purchase for the sole purpose of exercising dictator-like control. Is strict control of the platform really worth upwards of $50M?

Nonetheless, I wouldn’t take a crack at developing the next big Twitter client right now.

A couple days ago, TweetDeck dropped a completely revamped version of their iOS app.

Most of the interface elements make perfect sense, but take a little time getting used to. Pinching columns out for an overhead view works great, but it’s not intuitively obvious. It’d be great to see some kind of overlay when first signing in that shows an example of the gesture. It’s the same problem that plagues Twitter for Mac and Twitter for iPad. They have some awesome three-finger gestures that work brilliantly, but they’re tucked away far too deep.

The inverted scrollbar is a little strange at first; most apps use the center of the bar to indicate your position, but TweetDeck uses the bottom of the bar to show where you are. And when you scroll up, the bar shortens instead of moving. Again, once you get used to it, it’s a great experience. I love the way that column headers are represented when viewing, though – the shadow of the notification light when viewing unread tweets looks really slick.

Performance is also vastly improved – even on my iPhone 3G, scrolling is smooth, and the app locks into your swipe between columns much better. No one enjoys highlighting a tweet when you’re intending to switch columns.

Aside from a few quirks, this app is much more polished than the previous iteration. Hit up the download!

Admittedly, this post should probably be titled “Apple Trends” – the past week’s been pretty saturated with fruit. So be it.

iPhone location tracking

In a blowup that we’ve all heard about, iOS 4′s been discovered to store a file, consolidated.db, that contains latitude and longitude coordinates of its location history.  The issue’s hit the mainstream news, and a good amount of people are now freaking out that “Apple knows where I am”. It’s important to understand that the file is stored locally, not on Apple’s servers. Maybe I’ve been conditioned by the use of Foursquare and the like, but I don’t see a huge cause for concern. The lack of user consent is a little disconcerting, but as long as users act with responsibility in the security of their device, there shouldn’t be an opportunity for anyone to snatch the file. That means don’t jailbreak, install OpenSSH, and leave the default password.

iPhone 5 (4S) buzz building

It’s been pretty well-circulated that the iPhone 5 won’t be coming until after June, and if Reuters is anywhere near the mark, it looks like September is the magic month. The next-generation phone’s also being rumored to sport an A5 processor; BGR somehow picked up a T-Mobile test device which backs up the theory. Deetz on the naming scheme weren’t given, but I’d hope Apple continues with “iPhone 5″ for the sake of consistency, although my bets are on the rumored “iPhone 4S” based on the history of “3G” and “3GS”. Both are consistent in their own right, though, depending if you compare it to numerical progressions or past devices.

Apple sues Samsung…and vice versa

Apple’s suing Samsung based on allegations that TouchWiz has too many user interface similarities to iOS.  I’ve never used a Samsung device full-time, but I’m not sold on the similarities between the two platforms, especially when a lawsuit’s in play. The whole idea of skinning Android has never been something I’m fond of, but Apple’s taking the wrong approach in granularly comparing color schemes and icons. An OS shouldn’t be defined by textbook UI elements, but by the overall feeling that washes over the user when using the device. In that respect, TouchWiz can’t *touch* iOS; unfortunately, that “overall feeling” is extremely difficult to quantify. So let’s just sue each other.

Phat beats in the cloud

Reuters is at it yet again, claiming that Apple’s positioned to beat Google to market in rolling out a cloud music storage platform. Regardless of internal progress, I doubt Apple will announce anything too soon, even at WWDC. The scenario that makes the most sense to me would be an expansion of their typical September music event to include the unveiling of the iPhone 5/4S in conjunction with the music service. The race to 1.0 probably won’t be as huge of a deal as it’s being made out to be, though – both Apple and Google have a solid base of users, and each platform’s users will end up using the respective service independent of the other.

Thoughts? Nervously looking around and taking a hammer to your iPhone? Supporting Apple or Samsung in the series of lawsuits? Comment away!