Microblogging has recently gained a lot of traction on the cyberspace. Everyone seems to be a very interested. I also decided to try out my chances at Microblogging.
There were quite a few things which were playing around in my mind. First of all, why would people be interested in finding out what I am interested in and what I am doing at a certain point of time during the day. Most of the posts I have been coming across in Twitter and FaceBook makes me respond with “So… ?” Also the idea of fitting your entire emotions and ideas within 140 characters seemed to be a bit too much for me.
I have this bad habit of trying to look under the hoods of everything. My first task was to find a suitable microblogging client which was native to MacOS. While there are many clients out there, I started off with Twitterific. This client does a neat job of hiding behind the menubar without creating useless clutter on my dock which I think is a very good idea. However soon I got bored with the UI and the way it manages tweets. The entire idea of putting all information from public timelines to direct messages seemed a bit too much to me. Also, there seemed to be a race condition in which if I do not have a working internet connection on my notebook when Twitterific starts, it consumes too much CPU.
The next app to be tested was TweetDeck. There are lots of good reviews for this app. However this is an Adobe Air application and I am allergic to that.
The next app which I was really looking forward to was Tweetie Unlike the other two applications, this is not a freeware. There is an ad supported edition which I think is pretty good. The application is pretty sleek and also pretty low on memory requirements. It just consumes over 38MB of Resident memory.
The only thing I didn’t like about Tweetie is it does not have a provision to be hidden from the dock. It is possible to manually edit the plist for this app and make this invisible from the dock, but that creates other problems. Also another bug that I found was, if I start this program as a part of my login programs, the icon does not appear on the menubar. I think I am going to open up a support ticket with Atebits Software.
Looks like this is going to be my Twitter client for a while now.
You can follow me on twitter @subhrokar