Playing with Twitter interfaces

Conor — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 01:55:31 +0000

I’m a Twitterer. Yes, that means loser.

Since I don’t have a phone with which to produce and consume Twitter updates, I’ve been relying very heavily on ways to use the service from my computer. As with any oft-used process on my computer, I’m trying to optimize it.

Web interface

Let’s start with the basics. The first option is of course the basic web interface.

Unfortunately, this is way too blocky and inefficient. Worst of all, using it means I have to navigate to the webpage to view it; there are no “push” capabilities, informing me of updates when I’m paying attention to something else.

TwitterFox

For a while after ditching the web interface, I was using TwitterFox, and it treated me quite well. Since I more or less live in a browser, it was a convenient way to keep track of updates and post my own.

I find this interface very sharp, actually. The downsides were that it doesn’t function like a desktop application, as it lives within the browser, and therefore can’t be resized or repositioned. Initially I didn’t think that would bother me, but as I began to use it more often, I found myself really wanting this functionality.

Mitter

Cue Mitter. I found it by poking around on GetDeb and figured I’d give it a spin.

This interface is much more what I was going for, both sparse and pretty. And best of all, I can resize it and stick it wherever I want! I personally prefer to have Twitter communication located on the same virtual desktop as my e-mail client (in the absence of the up-and-coming Mozilla Messaging client, which should integrate the two), and now I can do that.

I’m currently using v0.3.2.2 of Mitter, so it should be obvious that the program is not without its problems. For example, the textbox does not resize for hefty tweets (like a twoosh):

Compare this with how the web interface handles it:

Pretty sad. In addition to that, there’s the silly problem of not being able to simply click on URLs. Rather, the user has to right-click on them and then choose an action from a nested menu. Gah!

This design decision definitely reinforces the “right-click everything” mindset of Linux that makes me feel like I’m playing Starcraft at all times.

Closing thoughts

I didn’t bother to include interfaces like the sidebar in Flock because right now they’re whining about changes in Twitter’s API. And while I’m sure there are very well polished desktop apps for Windows and OS X, I didn’t feel driven to try them out.

I think that for the time being, I’ll oscillate between Mitter and good ol’ TwitterFox. The former has a great presentation that integrates well with my desktop environment, and the latter is superior in terms of update notification. Ideally, I’d love to use both concurrently, but with the Twitter API only supporting calls every 5 minutes (and I often change my clients to update at 10 minute intervals, because I get blocked when using 5 minute checks during heavy load times), there’s no way I could keep both running.

I’ll keep an eye out for patches to Mitter, as I think it’s showing huge promise this early. But ultimately I think there’ll be a much more all-encompassing solution coming down the road in a few months, like a prototype for the Mozilla Messaging project I mentioned earlier. And that’ll really hit the spot for me.

Snap, crunch, break

Conor — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 15:12:24 +0000

Anyone reading this via RSS feeds probably noticed I destroyed that functionality today. My bad on that. I was renaming folders under the blog settings and I thought that I could cover my tracks with redirects for backward compatibility, meaning old links–such as http://www.conorschaefer.com/Blog/index.php/feed/–would remain operational. But nay.

Coming to the homepage of the blog will always work fine, and display the site regardless of the state of the various accoutrements like RSS functionality. That said, I’ll try to give a bit of warning or at least test beforehand if (or when, I should say) I do anything like this in the future.

For those of you not viewing this blog using RSS, please look into it! (Judging by the number of hits on my RSS feed versus the number coming directly to the homepage, it appears most people are using a bookmark.) RSS is a much more convenient for browsing frequently updated sites like blogs. Look up in the address bar of this site, and you should see this icon:

Anytime you see that, the site you’re looking at has an RSS feed. You can then use that button to set a “Live Bookmark,” which dynamically updates itself to show the latest headlines (blog entries) each time you click on it.

Also, if you have a lot of feeds, please check out Netvibes. It is far and away the best feed manager I’ve ever used, as it allows you to view the entire site to which the feed belongs, rather than just the entry text, as some readers (Google’s, for instance) restrict you to looking at.