Twitterific 1.1
Published 17 years, 11 months pastIn case you’re one of the people who’s been following the Twitter stuff, and you’re on OS X, then kindly allow me to direct your attention to Twitterific 1.1. Despite its paltry 0.1 increase in version number, it’s acquired some great new features.
The most wonderful addition, in my opinion, is a preference setting that lets you make the window act modal, or not, as you prefer. Having set my copy to “act as normal window”, at least half my problems with Twitterific were abolished. They’ve also changed the auto-hide behavior so that it will auto-hide a short interval after popping up, whereas before it would only auto-hide after a manual refresh (at least, that’s how my copy behaved). This makes it a lot easier to ignore in the background, since it won’t behanging around until you bring it to the foreground. Perhaps this is a side effect of it acting like a normal window. Regardless, it’s welcome. In addition, I like the ability to define a hotkey to bring up the Twitterrific window and the “launch when I login” option.
They’ve also added a post character counter, so you know how close you are to hitting the tweet cap. That’s nice to see, though as I understand it, the number of characters permitted for a post is dependent on the number of characters in your username. Twitterific just gives you a flat 141 characters—which, given the basic nature of Twitter, seems like it really ought to be more than enough.
Now, if it just let me define my own background-foreground colors and made it easier to replace the alert sound, I’d regard it as being pretty much perfect. (Yes, I can dig into the package contents and replace the alert sound, but I’d rather there was a preference setting so that I don’t have to futz around inside the package every time I update the software.)
Oh, and if you’re a Twitterific user, you absolutely want to add Twitterific as a friend, since they use that channel to tweet release announcements and tips on using Twitterific. If I’d had them added to my Twitter account, I wouldn’t have had to post about my frustration over trying to change usernames—they’d tweeted the answer the day before I posted here—and could have thus been spared the shame of broadcasting to the world my ignorance of the proper spelling of “terrific”. Though I suppose in that case, I’d still be ignorant, so maybe it’s better I posted after all.
Well, either way, if you’re using Twitterific 1.0 or an OS X user interested in using Twitter, check out the new version.
Comments (4)
Despite all the improvements in 1.1, I still find Twitterific to be horrifically flawed in a number of irritating ways.
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.
Come on you guys: after the same of the two f’s it might be worth getting the two r’s in there. [OK, OK, I was about to write in grumbling about the fact that the name *should* have two r’s, and surprisingly managed to check the URL before compounding the nonsense!
Think “twit” plus “terrific”, as in “terrific twit”.
Twitterrific!
And now I need to cry at my own ungrammatical sentences and unclosed brackets. Ah, must be time for a weekend…
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