Rubénerd!

The Twitter client episode!

Scaring people who think I'm a chick (ha!); late Friday night train journeys; nostalgia for 2007 Twitterland with Twitterrific; TwitterFon inserting advertisements; moving over to Tweetie on the iTelephone; obsessively using the huge but efficient TweetDeck; and the spectacular cost of mobile phone company text messages!

Download MP3 to listen 21:30 10.0MiB

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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 ;).

AFTERWORD (is that a word?): After submitting this post I got a very helpful comment from Gedeon at the IconFactory who helped to explain why I was getting these errors and possible remedies.

As it turns out the cynical conclusion I came to about my computer preventing me from becoming too addicted to Twitter by forcing me not to use it as much... was ironically accurate! As it turns out Twitter itself has a limit to the number of accesses to their site you can make in a given period of time, and obviously with Twitterrific running on my Mac, TwitBin running on Firefox on FreeBSD and m.twitter.com on my phone I consistently overshoot my allowed number.

Twitterrific is a native Mac OS X application that displays tweets you and your friends have posted on Twitter, the microblogging site that I am hopelessly addicted to and post to almost every hour of every day.

Well I was having no end of trouble with the 2.x series of it on Mac OS X Leopard which is understandable considering it was written originally for Tiger, the latest version seems only to have added advertising and not fixed the endless stream of Twitter Errors that seem to always sit as the first post:

ASIDE: That advertisement for Camino popped up just before I took the screenshot. As you might have already read, Camino is my favourite web browser on Mac... how ironic!

I've tried allowing the Twitterrific app in the new Leopard firewall settings panel and have checked all my other networking settings but it still shows these errors constantly. To get a version without advertisements you have to pay $20.00, but I want to know that what I pay for actually works :(.

Anyone else had problems running Twitterrific on Leopard? I tried running Snitter as an alternative, but uninstalled it because it was giving me even more problems. Does my beloved MacBook Pro think I'm wasting too much time on Twitter and is trying to stop me posting to it? Is it an intervention on my computer's part? That's probably the reason!

If there's any better way to start a day, I sure as hell don't know about it.

The Elke and Ruben discussing stupid news episode!

Rubenerd sister Elke joins us to discuss ridiculous news articles, stalker arguing social networking page was misleading, debating seedy MySpace profiles, gyrating at nightclubs, wasting time on Facebook and Friendster, Ruben's and Elke's Twitter pages, giving away personal details, Aussie PM John Howard trying to filter the internet, easy to stumble on sleaze online, Ted Steven's series of tubes, is there blame-shifting going on, oxymoronic fuel efficient SUVs, combatting efficient Japanese cars, hugging trees, good publicity without substance, Elke's mass communication studies course thing, actually learning nothing useful, chemistry and economics, high school friend Boyd Anderson's site is mysteriously down, friggen mouse pointers, Blackle is my new favourite search engine, lesbians in The Sims, dark background on light text, energy efficiency tips, Freddo Frogs, comparing American to British, Aussie and Belgian chocolate, Hershey's Kisses are icky, New Zealand accents, Russell Crowe on South Park and throwing phones, no breast implants in space, voting Green not Libertarian, Ruben's heterosexuality, hacker webmasters, reading Twitterrific posts from Felix and Frank Nora live, furnaces in the tropics, Japanese and Aussie expats in Singapore, friggen ang mohs, caucasian guys like being special, Elke's immaturity and unpleasantness, mysterious Champs-Élysées song discovered by surrealist, faulty Nokia phone batteries, URL redundancies, random women forcing themselves on you, Frank's QuarkXPress woes, The Sunscreen Song and John Howard's contorted facial expressions.

Download MP3 to listen ↓ 51:00 minutes, 23.40MiB

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