Asking: Twitter Clients
Twitter changed something this week, and whatever it was broke clients, including my beloved Twhirl, which is no longer being supported and therefore will never be fixed. I have two Twitter accounts (one I actually use, one I use only to follow celebrities), otherwise I would probably resign myself to just using the (in many ways inadequate) website forever. Here are the features I want in a desktop client that I loved about Twhirl:
(Just so you understand how important this is to me, my alternate post title was "Summer Meltdown Number Two." And, yes, I did cry my eyes out over this. If I can't find a useful client, my alternate plan is to just stop following celebrities on Twitter, which is not what I really want to do.)
- Pops up tweets in the corner of the screen. I don't mean a notification that there are tweets, I mean the actual tweets. I don't know what the duration of Twhirl's popups was, but it was more than long enough for me to read the tweet. (If there were four or more, it would just pop up a notification that there were x number of tweets, and then you had to go look at the actual client. This is acceptable behavior.)
- Everything in one column. I do not want separate columns or tabs or pages for replies. I want all tweets by people I follow and any tweets that are replies to or mention me (even if they're from people I don't follow) in one list.
- Supports multiple accounts, each in their own column.
- Not ugly. I tried out TweetDeck, and it's hideous. I want black text on a white background, but I will accept black text on a light gray background, which was one of the Twhirl color schemes. (I also liked that replies were in a different color - Twhirl made the background a dark yellow - but that's not a dealbreaker.)
- Must work with low screen resolutions. I have a relatively small monitor, and my resolution is set at 800x600. TweetDeck's desktop client is mostly unusable at that resolution (and if you try to do anything with settings on their web version, the box is so far to the right that the x to close it is off the screen). I need something either small or sensibly scalable.
- Ability to retweet with commentary. This isn't a dealbreaker, but I get frustrated every time I try to use the website to retweet something because it doesn't let you add commentary unless you copy and paste into a new tweet. I would like to be able to do this in a sensible, one-step way.
- Has a Windows XP version. Yeah, whatever, I live in the dark ages of computer software. I've yet to run into a reason to upgrade.
(Just so you understand how important this is to me, my alternate post title was "Summer Meltdown Number Two." And, yes, I did cry my eyes out over this. If I can't find a useful client, my alternate plan is to just stop following celebrities on Twitter, which is not what I really want to do.)