Twitter clients
You'd think that a site such as Twitter would have some kind of official client but it doesn't seem to have anything in that respect at all. I suppose the chance of it having a Linux client would be slim anyway, so forget that I just said that. Actually, there are a lot of Linux clients which is quite astounding and I seem to be working my way through them at a steady pace which is not through choice, I can tell you.
I started off with Twitterfox which is an add-on for Firefox so it works through the browser. It was nice enough, but after a while it began to annoy me because if I happened to be in a workspace rather than the one Firefox was open in, it would shift the focus to the one with Firefox. If I tried to move it back before the pop-up went away, it would shift it back straight away. Really irritating, especially if you're doing something like working on graphics in the GIMP, the last thing you want is something that keeps changing your workspaces on you.
After that, I tried Tweetdeck as it came highly recommended from Robert Llewellyn. It runs on Adobe AIR so I had to install that too; I wasn't overly happy about having to install one thing in order to run another though. It is really good and I liked how it's set up so that you can make up groups of friends rather than getting them all en mass in one list. I wasn't sure about the pop-up notifications because it just says how many new tweets there are and in what group, rather than giving the actual content of the tweet. I also found that it was quite a resource hog and the longer it was open, the more CPU it took.
Next client was Spaz which has a horrible name and not a very nice look to it. It started off all right, but after I'd been using it for a short while, it turned out to be rather buggy. I didn't always get notification of tweets and often there was the notification sound but no pop-up, so I had to keep opening it up to read the new tweets. The whole point of having a client is because I want that notification, otherwise, I'd just check it through on the webpage! It was also a real CPU hog, even more so than TweetDeck because it took a lot of CPU up from the moment it was opened. I went back to TweetDeck but I soon got fed up with the amount of resources it took up.
I had a bit of a search for alternatives and found gTwitter which is pretty new but kept giving me connection failed errors. I found out that a lot of people have had the same problem with it and it doesn't seem to be getting sorted. Then I tried Twitux which is what I've been using for the past week or so. It's pretty lightweight which is a good thing and it doesn't look too bad. However, there's no text field in the client itself to send messages, you either have to do Ctrl+N to get a little pop-up or go into the menu for the same thing. It's a bit annoying, to have to keep doing that but I stuck with it until a few days ago when the pop-up notifications stopped appearing. So, another search brought up Gwibber which lots of people recommended as being the best Twitter client there is, so I'm now using that. It is very pretty to look at, has a text field and pop-up notifications, and so far it's not hogging all my CPU or memory. I'll see how it goes before I commit to agreeing that it is the best client ever (TM). It would be really nice if I could find a decent client, rather than having to keep swapping and changing every fortnight. Maybe I could also find an LJ client that has been updated since than 2007 too. Oh, don't make me laugh.
I started off with Twitterfox which is an add-on for Firefox so it works through the browser. It was nice enough, but after a while it began to annoy me because if I happened to be in a workspace rather than the one Firefox was open in, it would shift the focus to the one with Firefox. If I tried to move it back before the pop-up went away, it would shift it back straight away. Really irritating, especially if you're doing something like working on graphics in the GIMP, the last thing you want is something that keeps changing your workspaces on you.
After that, I tried Tweetdeck as it came highly recommended from Robert Llewellyn. It runs on Adobe AIR so I had to install that too; I wasn't overly happy about having to install one thing in order to run another though. It is really good and I liked how it's set up so that you can make up groups of friends rather than getting them all en mass in one list. I wasn't sure about the pop-up notifications because it just says how many new tweets there are and in what group, rather than giving the actual content of the tweet. I also found that it was quite a resource hog and the longer it was open, the more CPU it took.
Next client was Spaz which has a horrible name and not a very nice look to it. It started off all right, but after I'd been using it for a short while, it turned out to be rather buggy. I didn't always get notification of tweets and often there was the notification sound but no pop-up, so I had to keep opening it up to read the new tweets. The whole point of having a client is because I want that notification, otherwise, I'd just check it through on the webpage! It was also a real CPU hog, even more so than TweetDeck because it took a lot of CPU up from the moment it was opened. I went back to TweetDeck but I soon got fed up with the amount of resources it took up.
I had a bit of a search for alternatives and found gTwitter which is pretty new but kept giving me connection failed errors. I found out that a lot of people have had the same problem with it and it doesn't seem to be getting sorted. Then I tried Twitux which is what I've been using for the past week or so. It's pretty lightweight which is a good thing and it doesn't look too bad. However, there's no text field in the client itself to send messages, you either have to do Ctrl+N to get a little pop-up or go into the menu for the same thing. It's a bit annoying, to have to keep doing that but I stuck with it until a few days ago when the pop-up notifications stopped appearing. So, another search brought up Gwibber which lots of people recommended as being the best Twitter client there is, so I'm now using that. It is very pretty to look at, has a text field and pop-up notifications, and so far it's not hogging all my CPU or memory. I'll see how it goes before I commit to agreeing that it is the best client ever (TM). It would be really nice if I could find a decent client, rather than having to keep swapping and changing every fortnight. Maybe I could also find an LJ client that has been updated since than 2007 too. Oh, don't make me laugh.