Think “twit” plus “terrific”, as in “terrific twit”.

Twitterrific!

Firstly, since the application runs as a menubar item only (no Dock item or anything you can ‘switch’ to via option-tab) the only way to quit it is to open the Options page and clicking the Quit button. And the only way of doing that is to open the Twitterific window itself and click the little Options icon (and what’s up with the program having a menu bar icon that doesn’t actually open a menu?).

Secondly, despite now having the ability to act more like a ‘normal’ window it still has some odd quirks with its behaviour when open. In my mind, normal windows shouldn’t appear and disappear without user intervention, and so when I find that I’m scrolling through the list of recent twitters after the window has appeared, only for it to disappear on me suddenly… well, you get the idea!

The window itself behaves oddly in terms of focus and current tweet being shown (what’s the point of popping up to show an old tweet just because that was the last thing selected before it disappeared? Change the selection to the new one!) and I can’t figure for the life of me why they chose that 141 character arbitrary limit (why not deduct the username length from the max message length? People like Tantek grabbed the short usernames but they miss out on a few valuable characters in a limited medium).

I can’t help but feel that Twitterific is a lovely-looking but poorly behaved app, somewhat like that Disco CD burner. It has a nice icon, the translucent solid-colour window with rounded edges is really easy on the eye, but it doesn’t function too well. I still reckon a proper Window-based application with (optional) Growl integration would work far better.