Rubénerd Blog :)

I’ve been on Twitter since March 2007, and things sure have evolved from those days… check out the picture of Twitterrific 1.0 on the right from early 2007!

During that time I’ve changed Twitter clients 7 times:

Twitterrific

Fantastic little Aqua Mac OS X native application that was originally free (as in price), but in a controversial move they started forcing inline advertisements on users and wouldn’t remove them unless you paid a registration fee. That move put me off using it.

Snitter

Snook’s Twitter, an Adobe Air client that was small and could have it’s themes changed. Seemed to crash all the time though: in hindsight it was probably caused by Air and not his client itself, but at the time I gave up and moved on

TwitBin

A Twitter client sidebar for Mozilla Firefox that I used on my FreeBSD desktop machine before I realised that you’re only allowed to make a certain number of requests to the Twitter servers per hour. Figured it made sense just to use a client on my MacBook Pro.

Twhirl

Another Adobe Air client that felt like Snitter on steroids (a particularly apt comparison given the current athletic competition going on). Acted more like an aggregator than just a Tweet downloader; you could choose to read direct messages, replies, and apply filters.

TTYtter

A very customizable and powerful Unix command line Twitter client written in Perl. I still have it installed on my FreeBSD desktop when I want to use Twitter remotely, though I moved on to the client below for when I want to keep logs and for day-to-day use

Twitter Commandline

A much simpler and more lightweight Unix command line Twitter client that can post messages, read friends timelines and send direct messages. Also written in Perl which is nice because I can read and modify it.

For my primary Twittering needs though, I’ve moved over to a very sleek client called TweetDeck. From their site description:

TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application that is currently in public beta. It aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.

TweetDeck enables users to split their main feed (All Tweets) into topic or group specific columns allowing a broader overview of tweets. To do this All Tweets are saved to a local database. The far left column will always contain All Tweets. The GROUP, SEARCH and REPLIES buttons then allow the user to make up additional columns populated from the database. Once created these additional columns will automatically update allowing the user to keep track of a twitter threads far easier.

Unlike all the other graphical Twitter clients I’ve used, it splits up your screen into multiple columns so you can see your timeline, replies and direct messages right next to each other. It also has a very nice buzz column for the latest words and topics being discussed, and a search column you can customise. All the columns can be rearranged to your taste, and if you prefer the window can be "collapsed" into one column like a more traditional client.

Given it takes up your entire screen it works fantastically on widescreens such as the display on a MacBook Pro. I assigned it to it’s own space in Mac OS X Leopard so whenever I want to check all my Twittery goodness I just navigate to that virtual desktop. Notification messages appear regardless of whatever virtual desktop or space you’re in at the time, which is very useful.

ASIDE: I also love the dark background with light text colour scheme because it’s so much easier on the eyes, especially late at night when my eyes are tired. I think people who use dark backgrounds with light text are very intelligent, smart and bright people who I’m sure are also incredibly attractive, desirable and humble as well.

My only gripes are: the font is a tad big, meaning vertically it shows less tweets per column than Snitter, Twitterrific or Twhirl, the icon tends to hide itself on the Dock when my desktop background is dark as well, and it doesn’t respond to mouse gesteres on Macs, though the latter problem is surely a limitation with Air than the application itself.

I’ve well and truly given up on instant messaging clients. Who needs them when you have this good stuff? Reliability aside of course:

Classic Twitter-is-down message from Christmas 2007

When I published my last post here on my experiences with Snitter including it’s new Leopard skin, comparing it’s advertisement free interface to Twitterrific, and being a bit critical about about the Adobe Air platform it was written on; I had no idea that it would be the latter point that would generate feedback!

Today Daniel Dura posted a comment on my aforementioned weblog post:

Ruben, I am a platform evangelist at Adobe and also work closely with the AIR team. You say:

“Snitter is of course an Adobe Air application which means it’s really clumsy to install and upgrade, and doesn’t work the same way native Mac applications do.”

Would you mind clarifying this a bit? I know Jonathan provides an install badge on his site. Using that badge, you should only be 2-3 clicks from installing the application. If you had issues with the install or other problems, let us know.

I will do my best to answer your query! There are several serious problems I have with the Adobe Air platform, including the fact the applications don’t integrate well with the desktop systems they’re running on, they don’t install correctly when you use restricted operating system accounts, and it’s not open source.

Firstly, as web applications masquerading as regular applications, they don’t do a very good job with integrating with the desktop, especially on Mac OS X. For example, the OS X convention for small windows with rounded edges is that they can be moved across the screen by clicking and dragging any portion of the window. If you do this on all but the title bar in Air applications they don’t move, but rather unexpectedly select text and elements in the application.

This behavior really is maddening, especially for a messenger-like application which you may be attempting to scroll through or move around a lot during the course of a day.

Secondly, if for security reasons you use a limited or standard account on OS X for day-to-day usage and only uses the administrative account as a way for the machine to ask for confirmation and a password before you install software or modify settings, the Adobe Air runtime installer and any Air applications you attempt to install simply fail.

I’ll explain what I mean with an example: to install most software on Mac OS X, you either run the installer or drag the application package over to your Applications folder. In both of these cases if you are running in a limited account it will prompt you to enter the username and password of an administrator. In this way you never actually have to log into the administrative account because, just like in UNIX with sudo, you’re only using the administrative account to authorise actions. It’s the best of both worlds!

Adobe Air doesn’t do this on OS X. When you attempt to install the runtime, it automatically assumes it’s running as an administrator, then proceeds to crash when you try to install. The exact same thing happens when you use the "install badge" such as the one on the Snitter page.

The only solution is to physically log out, log in as the administrator, install the runtime, use the install badge to install Air software, log out and log back in as a limited user. This is the virtually the only software on Mac that requires this, and you even need to do it every single time an application is updated and requires an upgrade!

And finally, the little alert light started flashing in my head as soon as I read that Adobe Air uses Flash. I dislike Flash because:

• It’s not open source so requires the purchasing of proprietary and very expensive Flash authoring software (in terms of resource use and financial cost) that Adobe doesn’t bother making available for Linux or BSD.
• As a user of FreeBSD and NetBSD as well as Mac OS X, Adobe really rubs me the wrong way when they refuse to even acknowledge the existence of these operating systems let alone provide official clients for them. Adobe letting us users know we’re not worth their trouble.
• Previous bad experiences with Flash, as well as Ajax.

So even if all the above criticisms about desktop integration and access control were addressed and I could breathe in Adobe Air goodness, the fact is I could only use applications I write in it on only a small fraction of my machines. For a company that generates as much revenue and holds such a strong position in it’s respective markets, there is really no excuse other than arrogance I can see for maintaining this position.

I appreciate Adobe’s efforts to create a system for web developers to create client side, desktop applications and am glad that it’s providing competition to Silverlight and JavaFX which hopefully will help consumers, but these shortcomings for time being mean I won’t be paying too much attention to it, which is a shame.

The super dark sky no cohesion episode!

ACT ONE: Show reminiscing, exponential curves in the morning, This is Why I’m Hot, Wikipedia excesses, getting Snitters, interconnected crap, Compton, Anglosphere rivalry, pavlova and trifle.

ACT TWO: Yuletide and Christmas coming, family shopping always the hardest, the Ducati USB thumb drive, 9-11 conspiracy theorists heckle Bill Maher, YouTube reviews, The Google, locked doors, senility, Nokia e61i, iPhones, Casey Stoner, Elke playing Neopets, great nerdy insult, grand pianos on lanyards, impromptu Starbucks thermos review, Costa Coffee in the UK, Singapore Post.

ACT THREE: Singapore PrimaDeli food poisoning scandal, the Ministry of Health is MOH, unfortunate cake ingredient lists.

ACT FOUR: Cheap bulbs in lava lamps, music review of Ska Cubano, Ay Caramba and Istanbul is Constantinople, Last.fm account, losing music in iTunes.

ACT FIVE: Alien DJs, music is the soundtrack to your life, work sucks time (no, really?), floods in Singapore, storms closest to snow we can get here, Dave Wares on tudor houses, and crazy dead lifts.

Download MP3 to listen ↓ 1:07:00, 32.10MiB

You can also stream this episode and view its Internet Archive page.

Because one of my main production machines is a Mac and I’m addicted to Twitter, I’m always on the lookout for changes in the Mac Twitter client landscape. That was a sentence that stated the obvious if ever I’ve read one.

So anyway I downloaded the latest version of the Snitter (Snook’s Twitter) client because it includes a custom Leopard skin:

Ironically even though it fits nicely into my Mac desktop environment, I still prefer the pink colour scheme! And the best thing? No advertisements!

Now to be fair Snitter is of course an Adobe Air application which means it’s really clumsy to install and upgrade, and doesn’t work the same way native Mac applications do, through no fault on the part of Jonathan Snook of course.

Because I run my day-to-day account on all my machines as limited accounts for security reasons which I may dedicate a post to soon, installing Snitter requires me to log out, log in as my administrative user to install Adobe Air, the install Snitter, then log out and log back into my limited account. With most Mac applications when I attempt install it asks me for an administrative password which negates this time consuming step.

That said though Snitter still is the best Mac Twitter client. Twitterrific used to hold that position for me, but forcing ads on it’s users in newer versions unless they pay money was really not a cool move… but that’s for another post ;).