Twittelator Neue. Tweet Different. from Ollie Wagner on Vimeo.

From a UI/UX perspective, Neue’s the most beautiful Twitter client I’ve seen, bar none. But its loaded with functionality too. Here’s a sampling of its features:

• Timeline Photos. Twittelator Neue places previews of photos directly under the tweets they came from. With just a single touch, the photo springs to life, giving you immediate access to the full-size image.
• Website Previews. No longer will you wonder what’s behind the curtain of a shortened URL. Twittelator Neue loads previews of the links in a tweet. A quick tap and the website is at the ready. It’s a site-seeing sneak peek.
• Multiple Timelines. Twittelator Neue elegantly allows for the addition of multiple timelines, known as Timeline Shortcuts, to your main friends Timeline. Whether it’s something hot in the news that you’re keen to keep tabs on, or something of a more permanent nature, Multiple Timelines in Twittelator Neue is the smart solution to keeping up with what’s important.
• Multiple Accounts. Have a blog, band, or alter-ego that has tweets of its very own? Twittelator Neue has you covered. Just touch the accounts button and the interface animates down, providing instant access to any given one.
• Simultweet. When you want to tweet the same thing from multiple accounts – let’s say an announcement, invitation, link, or anything else – Twittelator Neue makes it a breeze. A tap or two and you’re all set. Simultweet in Twittelator Neue handles all of your multiple-personalities with ease.

Neue took a beating in the App Store reviews for daring to charge $2 per year (via in-app purchase) for push notifications. These are probably the same people that don’t tip waitresses. C’mon people, we’re talking about $2 here.

When I asked developer Andrew Stone about the up-charge, he had this to say:

We partnered with Boxcar - so we have to pay for servers - we carefully reviewed what was a sustainable business model and opted to be honest about that instead of hiding the costs with new sales. Eventually that model will collapse. That people expect stuff for free will eventually become a problem for most developers.

Besides, anyone can get free push notifications from http://boxcar.io.

I was initially surprised that Neue didn’t utilize the Single Sign-On (SSO) feature for Twitter that Apple built into iOS 5, but there’s a good reason for the omission. As it turns out, Apple’s Twitter SSO implementation is mostly broken. Most developers don’t implement Apple’s SSO because it’s lacking support for DM’s. Twittelator Neue opted for a bit of inconvenience up front in order to implement a full Twitter experience. Developers have been asking Apple (and Twitter) to fix this for eight months.

Neue is the best Twitter client for the iPhone. Period.

Steve Jobs was awarded a GRAMMY Trustees Award tonight at the 54th annual music awards gala.

The National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences awards its GRAMMY Trustees Award every year to “individuals who, during their careers in music, have made significant contributions, other than performance, to the field of recording.” Past recipients include Robert Moog (1970), Les Paul (1983), Walt Disney (1989) and Clive Davis (2000).

Apple senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, Eddy Cue, accepted the award on Jobs’ behalf.

The post about the Trustees Award for Jobs on the GRAMMYs site was penned by Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, himself a 16-time GRAMMY winner. Ma also played at the private memorial service for Steve Jobs on October 16, 2011 with U2’s Bono and Joan Baez.

Before I met Steve, I first had to say no to him. In the early ’90s, I was touring like a madman, trying to juggle professional commitments and a home life with a young family, when a call came in. Steve Jobs was getting married at Yosemite and he wanted me to play. I declined with great regret. When we met, years later, I was also introduced to his wife and children. The simplicity, directness and openness of his family really struck me. Steve showed me the things he cared about, and I shared the music I would have played at their wedding. From there, the friendship grew.

It’s a touching read and well-deserved award for Jobs.

Apple previously won a technical GRAMMY award in 2002.

Updated: Video of Apple VP Eddy Cue accepting the award for Steve Jobs:

I don’t get into awards shows much, with one exception, The GRAMMYs. (

If you’re watching the 54th Annual GRAMMY Awards tonight (CBS 8:00 p.m. ET/5:00 p.m. PT) on television I recommend that you watch it with the excellent GRAMMY Live app for iOS (free, App Store).

It features live video from the event itself as well as news, video and photos.

You can also use the app to see the list of nominees, play GRAMMY trivia, and read tweets from the official GRAMMY account, GRAMMY contenders and GRAMMY insiders.

You can also use the iOS app (which works on both iPhone and iPad) to listen to music from your favorite GRAMMY nominees (via GRAMMY Radio) and pick who you think The Recording Academy’s voting members will choose to win the coveted GRAMMY Award across 20 categories with the Guess the GRAMMYs interactive poll.

Dragon Dictation did it.

Path did it.

Why?

Because Apple turns a blind eye to the single largest privacy problem facing it today: Address Book uploads.

Fellow ZDNET blogger Charlie Osborne brings word (via Dustin Curtis) that Apple makes a standard practice of approving apps that upload the entire contents of your iOS address book (including names, address, phone numbers, emails — everything!) to developer’s servers.

In fact, Curtis notes that 13 of the 15 iOS developers he informally polled admitted that they copy their user’s Address Books and have databases of “millions” of contacts. One company even bragged that it had “Mark Zuckerberg’s cell phone number, Larry Ellison’s home phone number and Bill Gates’ cell phone number.”

Set aside, for a moment, Apple’s indiscretions.

Some assumptions I make about my private contact data:

1. Developers won’t sell, share or even view this information
2. Developers take great care to protect the privacy of this information

The problems with the above assumptions are twofold:

1. Developers are human (and often overworked)
2. Developers can be hacked (Zappos, anyone?)

So why do developers risk the massive public backlash that address book uploads — when discovered — can (and do) cause?

The most interesting part of Curtis’ post was about the risk/reward ratio to developers who engage in the practice:

Any app is an investment, and, like any investment, there are three outcomes — success, failure, and mediocrity. The only one that matters on a market like the App Store is success, so fledgling app developers do everything they can to increase their chances. Because Apple provides extremely easy access to address book data, the pro — that is, using the data to improve user experience, increase virality and growth, etc. — outweighs the con.

But therein lies the rub. “Apple provides extremely easy access to address book data.”

This is patently absurd and actually boggles my mind. Apple will refuse an app for any number of insane reasons, let it routinely approves apps that upload your Address Book wholesale? Something’s wrong here. Very wrong.

Again, Curtis:

On iOS, every other seemingly private local data source, like location and the camera roll, have strong protections; apps can’t even see photos in the Camera Roll unless the user explicitly selects them from the image picker. There is a huge section of the Settings app dedicated to giving people fine control over which apps have access to location information. That Apple provides no protections on the Address Book is, at best, perplexing.

What’s more, AB uploads appear to be in direct violation of Apple’s own rules for apps.

According to Apple’s Developer TOS:

17.1: Apps cannot transmit data about a user without obtaining the user’s prior permission and providing the user with access to information about how and where the data will be used

17.2: Apps that require users to share personal information, such as email address and date of birth, in order to function will be rejected

Assuming that you have information about yourself in your Address Book, (Siri, for example, requires you to have a “me” contact to help it interpret commands like “give me directions home”), surreptitious uploads of your AB file would be a direct violation of section 17.1 of Apple’s iOS TOS.

And even if you didn’t have a “me” contact in your Address Book, contact information would almost certainly qualify as “personal information” and thus be forbidden for developers to upload under section 17.2.

Right?

Apple hasn’t replied to a request for comment. I will update this story when it does.

Related Reading:

• Path discovered phoning home with your address book
• Critical Path: Here’s how Path can save itself, if it acts fast
• Path CEO Dave Morin: Mea Culpa

Follow me on Twitter for early access to my posts. Tweet me with the hashtah #ZDNET if you’d like to be considered for inclusion.

Follow @JasonOGrady

Finally.

Bowing to the enormous pressure of an Internet scorned, Path CEO Dave Morin posted an apology to its users today on the Path blog.

Path’s PR agency sent the following email to me at around 3:00pm ET time after I emailed Morin last night for comment about Pathgate:

We are sorry.

We made a mistake. Over the last couple of days users brought to light an issue concerning how we handle your personal information on Path, specifically the transmission and storage of your phone contacts.

As our mission is to build the world’s first personal network, a trusted place for you to journal and share life with close friends and family, we take the storage and transmission of your personal information very very seriously.

Through the feedback we’ve received from all of you, we now understand that the way we had designed our ‘Add Friends’ feature was wrong. We are deeply sorry if you were uncomfortable with how our application used your phone contacts.

In the interest of complete transparency we want to clarify that the use of this information is limited to improving the quality of friend suggestions when you use the ‘Add Friends’ feature and to notify you when one of your contacts joins Path––nothing else. We always transmit this and any other information you share on Path to our servers over an encrypted connection. It is also stored securely on our servers using industry standard firewall technology.

We believe you should have control when it comes to sharing your personal information. We also believe that actions speak louder than words. So, as a clear signal of our commitment to your privacy, we’ve deleted the entire collection of user uploaded contact information from our servers. Your trust matters to us and we want you to feel completely in control of your information on Path.

In Path 2.0.6, released to the App Store today, you are prompted to opt in or out of sharing your phone’s contacts with our servers in order to find your friends and family on Path. If you accept and later decide you would like to revoke this access, please send an email to service@path.com and we will promptly see to it that your contact information are removed.

We care deeply about your privacy and about creating a trusted place for you to share life with your close friends and family. As we continue to expand and grow we will make some mistakes along the way. We commit to you that we will continue to be transparent and always serve you first, our users.

We hope this update clears up any confusion. You can find Path 2.0.6 in the App Store here:http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/path/id403639508?mt=8

Link to post: http://blog.path.com/post/17274932484/we-are-sorry

Needless to say, I’ve already emailed my opt-out request to service@path.com.

The Twitterverse seems pretty equally divided on the topic:

@JasonOGrady While it seemed scary at first, I think their quick response andupdate was made the mess very well handled. Opted in for…

— HK (@sjwasawesome) February 9, 2012

@JasonOGrady It’s a social app. Of course it had access to my AB.They showed up in the App. DLing and storing it is Path’s wrong doing.

— Randal Santia (@sw0rdfish) February 9, 2012

Deleted #Path due to negligent privacy practices.Until opt out is permanent & I can manually delete my data, they’re boycotted! @JasonOGrady

— addicted2iphone (@addicted2iphone) February 9, 2012

So, is it enough? I’d love to hear from other Path users on Morin’s response. Will you continue to use the service?
Follow me on Twitter for early access to my posts. Tweet me with the hashtag #ZDNET if you’d like to be considered for inclusion in a post.

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Earlier today I posted about how upstart social network Path was discovered uploading iOS user’s entire address books to it’s servers without notification and without asking for permission.

Here are four simple things that Path can do to right the ship, but the clock’s ticking…

1. Don’t wait for Apple to approve the 2.0.6 version of your iOS app with the opt-in feature. That could take days or weeks.
2. Allow users to delete their address book contents via your Web portal right now. (And do us a favor and dispense with the PR sounding “Automatic Moments” crap, we know that it’s just spin for automatically share our location).
3. Promise that the Address Book data that you’ve already compiled will be permanently deleted.
4. Beg for mercy. Don’t spin it or try the “it’s a feature” garbage, either. Just come clean and tell your users that you screwed up.

It’s quite simple really. If Path did the above by tomorrow, I’d consider re-installing the iOS app. But if it doesn’t, Path will suffer irreparable damage and users will defect in droves.

Path already dodged a bullet with it’s creepy automatic location sharing “feature” and I’m not sure that it can pull another rabbit out of its hat unless it takes immediate and decisive action.

Would you use Path for iOS in its current state?

That’s basically the response from Path’s management after the popular social networking service was discovered uploading users’ complete address book to its servers.

Path, for the unfamiliar, is a relatively new social network, billed as a “smart journal that helps you share life with the ones you love.” Think Foursquare meets Instagram meets (insert name here).

Developer Arun Thampi discovered the privacy issue and posted this to his blog:

It all started innocently enough. I was thinking of implementing a Path Mac OS X app as part of our regularly scheduled hackathon. Using the awesome mitmproxy tool which was featured on the front page of Hacker News yesterday, I started to observe the various API calls made to Path’s servers from the iPhone app. It all seemed harmless enough until I observed a POST request to https://api.path.com/3/contacts/add.

Upon inspecting closer, I noticed that my entire address book (including full names, emails and phone numbers) was being sent as a plist to Path. Now I don’t remember having given permission to Path to access my address book and send its contents to its servers, so I created a completely new “Path” and repeated the experiment and I got the same result – my address book was in Path’s hands.

Um, yeah. Your entire address book.

Now I don’t know about you, but I’d certainly expect a feature like address book upload to be opt-in (and optional) — not hidden with no way to opt-out. The other problem is the once Path already has your contact data, there’s no way to delete it — at least that I can find.

Path CEO Dave Morin quickly went into damage control mode and gave the classic It’s-a-feature-not-a-bug response, saying that the app uploads your entire address book “in order to help the user find and connect to their friends and family on Path quickly and effeciently as well as to notify them when friends and family join Path.” Morin goes on to explain that Path 2.0.6 for iOS makes address book upload opt-in, noting that it’s pending App Store approval.

Dan, it might be time to call in a few favors at Apple and get 2.0.6 escalated.

Not clearly disclosing a “feature” like complete address book upload and not giving users a simple way to opt-out is inexcusable. Many thanks to Arun (and the mitmproxy tool) for exposing this privacy breach.

Delete.

Update: It’s time for Apple to require that developers to disclose aspects of their apps that will impact user’s privacy. This is one key area where the Android Market does things better than the App Store does. Here’s a sample of the permission screen that you must acknowledge before installing the app My Tracks.

Update2: Here’s how Path can save itself, if it acts fast

Quick Look is a very useful feature of Mac OS X (introduced in Leopard), that lets users quickly peek into a file for a piece of data or to make sure the file is the one they really want to edit — all done without opening up the file’s application. On the desktop, it presents image files as thumbnail icons, and in the past, there was an unlabeled slider on either the upper or lower right hand corner of the window that lets users expand the photos’ size.

In a Mac discussion board, several users recently complained that this slider had disappeared with Lion and for many users this may be so. especially those new to the Mac. With the removal of the arrow buttons and the window grow button in Lion, Apple decided not to present the Status Bar for Finder windows in the default settings. However, we can recover it by selecting Show Status Bar under the View menu.

With the just the Toolbar showing, the slider isn’t there. With both Toolbar and Status Bar showing, the slider is on the lower right corner of the window. But if you toggle off the Toolbar and show just the Status Bar, the slider jumps up to the upper right hand corner (there’s no room for it in that view).

In addition, the slider can be found in the View Options menu (toggled with the Show View Options menu item, or by clicking the Action button at the top of the window — the one that looks like a gear). The slider here is named Icon size and slides between a 16-by-16-pixel view to 512-by-512 pixels.  You can see both sliders in the image below.

Now, I prefer to see the information in all the bars: the Status Bar, which shows how many items are in the folder as well as the remaining capacity for the volume; and the Path Bar, which shows the file path in icon and list views. Of course, no sensible user chooses the Cover Flow view.

In Phone Innovators Best Buy features a veritable who’s-who of mobile technology luminaries, including, Philippe Kahn, creator of one of the first cameraphones; Ray Kurzweil, inventor of text-to-speech; Daniel Henderson, creator of video sharing; Chris Barton and Avery Wang, two of the founders of Shazam; Jim McKelvey, creator of Square Mobile Pay; Kevin Systrom, creator of Instagram; Neil Papworth, creator of the text message; and Paul and David Bettner, creators of Words with Friends.

In the ad, the Words With Friends creators take a lighthearted jab at Alec Baldwin who was kicked off an American Airlines flight in December 2011 for refusing to stop playing the addictive word game.

Baldwin Tweeted:

Here’s the commercial:

Showing his sense of humor about the incident, Baldwin made a cameo appearance on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update spoofing the American Airlines pilot:

Best Buy posted a web-only, three minute version of the commercial where each of the phone innovators discusses their product in more detail.

You can watch it here:

My favorite line is from Instragram’s Kevin Systrom, who says: “it’s a little bit like being in a boy band, but, you know, it’s technology, right, um, so it’s kinda cool.”

Sure beats those lame GoDaddy and Samsung SuperBowl commercials.

What was your favorite SuperBowl ad?