Twucket - a minimalist Twitter app
Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Application, Review, Software Tuesday Jun 10, 2008For those of you who have been looking for a lightweight Twitter application that is native to Mac OS X (and in particular, doesn’t require the installation of any additional software), you may want to twy Twucket. Although the name is a bit of a twongue twister, it’s worth twaking a look at (okay, enough with the dumb Elmer Fudd impression):
Here’s the description from the developer’s web site:
Maybe you’re a Twitter user. Maybe you’d rather use a standalone program to access Twitter, instead of using a web browser. Maybe you’ve tried other Twitter clients and found them lacking, and maybe, just maybe Twucket is what you’ve been waiting for!
Twucket is a new Twitter client for Mac OS X Leopard. It’s designed to use a minimal amount of screen real estate, so you can keep an eye on your Twitter feed in a window small enough to leave open all the time.
Simple Window
Twucket runs in a normal window. Unlike some other Twitter clients which use “special” windows designed to hover in front of your other windows, Twucket behaves like a normal Mac application. Click it and it comes to the front; Drag another window in front of it and it goes behind the other window, just like you’d expect. Thousands of applications work this why; Why should a Twitter client behave differently?
Silent Operation
When you receive new messages from Twitter, Twucket remains remarkably quiet. You’ll hear no chirping, crowing, bleating, or anything else. For that matter, Twucket’s app icon won’t flash, bounce, wave at you, or do flips. Imagine the simplicity of new messages appearing without fanfare in your Twucket window. Isn’t life noisy enough?
Free (as in beer)
Twucket is free software, with no embedded ads or other annoyances. Download it, take it for a spin, share it with your friends.
For those of you that love Twitter, it’s about time you got a native Mac OS X Twitter program. The only thing we might wish for in an upcoming version is a way to automatically convert a long URL to a shorter one, using one of the many web-based services available for the purpose. Of course, Firefox users can always use the TinyURL Creator extension to convert the URL of a page being viewed to a TinyURL (unless you are using Firefox 3.0 - that extension is only for Firefox versions 1.5 through 2.0.0.*, although if you know how to hack the version information within the extension, it actually does appear to work under 3.0 RC 2).
EDIT: We have discovered one serious bug in Twucket - if you create a message that contains an ampersand (&), it truncates it just before the ampersand, sending only a partial tweet. You might say, so what, don’t use ampersands, but what if you are writing about M&M’s, or a company like AT&T? They need to get this fixed! This appears to have been fixed in version 1.1.0.
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