What can I say, Twitter has silenced the casual bloggers. Those who keep it up have a lot more to say then 140-some characters could hold.
So, my work finally provided me with a new laptop, a shiny new MacBook Pro. I probably should have waited until after the WWDC but I’m not expecting any world-shattering hardware released, except maybe for the much unticipated iPhone2. I am, however, expecting some awesome software news, like the rumoured announcement of OS X 1.6 “Snow Leopard”. It will supposedly be mostly security updates and tweaks and will be Intel only. If the last prooves true, this will mark the end of the PowerPC chapter in Apple’s book of CPUs.
Now for some rants. Twitter has been around for a while now and Twitter clients are popping up like weeds after the rain. Except that’s all they are, weeds! TwitterBerry blows. It’s horrible, so pointing the Blackberry browser to the Twitter home page is about the only way to have full functionality and none of the weirdness. Then there are a billion AIR apps that attempt to do Twitter. They all have a giant flaw: AIR! I love Adobe products, but AIR ain’t one of them. I think the ease of development is a blessing and a curse. On one hand it’s easy to make cool apps, on the other there are a lot of half-baked apps by people “dabbling in programing”.
I feel at this time there is a need for a multiplatform client that is:
- Fast
- Reliable
- Checks for Twitter status
- Checks for accidental double posts.
Therefore I’m stating an open-souce Twitter client project – BirdFeeder. It will be Ruby-based, with UI provided by the closest native UI to the platform the app is running on (i.e. Cocoa on Mac, GTK on Linux, and QT on Windows). I’ve applied for a SorceForge project page. We will see what happens. I will keep you all posted.
June 5, 2008 at 11:13 pm |
New layout looks cool.
That’s going to suck making the UIs for each platform. You could always put on some shoes. The only problem being that the user would need the shoes interpreter, but maybe that’s not so bad and would give you the native UIs from the same pretty code base. + it seems a lot better than it was back in the day.
BTW I tried all of the non-AIR twitter clients in the Ubuntu’s repos. They blow also. I just found out the other day that AIR is only in alpha for Linux and by alpha they mean alpha. Spaz decided to idle at 80% CPU.
I see a little rotate(‘:)’, 90, :clockwise) staring at me
June 5, 2008 at 11:20 pm |
I just might put it on some shoes. The problem before was lack of certain components, but at this point it should be usable. We shall see.
June 6, 2008 at 7:30 am |
Come on Max, write it in straight Qt. Why write client side Ruby? You’ll have to drag the runtime along with it, ick.
Write some tight, fast, C++ and call it a day! If you go that route I’d like to pitch in.
Oh, and I’ve found TwitterBerry to be more than sufficient. What do you find annoying? I’d like to hear more about that.
June 6, 2008 at 8:27 am |
On Ruby, I’m tempted by open-uri and ease of development, but you are absolutely right about the run time. It’ll be the same story as AIR. The distribution will be a bitch.
On TwitterBerry – tree things: a) No status indicator while processing the post (I keep wondering if it acknowledged me clicking “Update”). b) Limiting tweet sizes (you can show more then 4 words, it’s OK) and c) Profile picture refresh (And in addition once it downloads the picture, you have to scroll through ALL if the posts for it to show up instead of the unhappy face they used as the default icon)
Pitching in would be awesome! I’d love to have a GUI master on-board