Review of Free Twitter Clients

Twitter has taken over Flickr as the default web service for building desktop apps for. It’s especially great for people just learning to program because you already have the service there, you have the API to hook into and that leaves you all set to code and have some fun. Here’s a list of some great Twitter clients; some standalone and others that are built-into text editors.

Text Editors

Vim: Here’s a script that I wrote that allows you to Twitter from Vim. The usage details are all on the Vim Archive Page. It allows you to post from the command-line, buffer, current-line and visualized-text. It’s very simple and the only thing that it allows you to do is post, not view what people have posted.

Emacs: This is the script that I based my own off of, it allows you do all the things that the Vim one can do, the usage detail are in the script commented-out. You can get it here.

TextMate: Here’s another I wrote that you can post to Twitter from TextMate, this one is pretty nice because it brings up a GUI Dialog instead of the other TextMate Twitter scripts where you have to type the text into a window or select it and send it. You can get it here.

AIR Applications

AIR is Adobe’s cross-platform runtime-environment that allows you to build Internet applications using Flash, Flex, HTML and Ajax, and the apps can also be used on your desktop. These are the full-featured apps, they allow you to post, and view the people’s posts that you “follow.”

Twhirl: This one is unique in that it allows you connect to multiple Twitter accounts (although I don’t know why you would), it has the ability to shorten your URLs right in the app, allows you to post images to TwitPic, be able to search through tweets, has support for English, German, Italian and Spanish, has different color-schemes, and auto-updating. Other than those features it obviously has the features found in just about every other app like notifications of new tweets. Another thing Twhirl does that is always attractive to me is active development, the last release (0.7.3) came out on 2008-03-20.

Tweetr: This one lacks some of the features that Twhirl has and has a bit more of Zen-like, minimalist approach. I like the aesthetics of Tweetr more than any another application, by default it integrates with Leopard very nicely. Features that it is missing in comparison to Twhirl are: no built-in shortening of URLs (no big deal since Twitter does this anyway,) can’t look up Profiles, Friends, view your Archive or search through tweets in the app. Tweetr is also missing a lot of potential customizability in comparison to Twhirl. Tweetr is definitely more centered around simple posting and reading tweets, you can’t get the whole twitter experience from it, but Twhirl really tries to take over and be where you go to tweet, read other’s tweets, view other’s profiles and so forth and in doing so gives you the whole experience.

To sum it up; whenever I’m not inside TextMate I’ll use Twhirl, it certainly isn’t ugly but its not as polished as Tweetr however the abundance of features makes it very appealing to use.

Others to mention: Spaz, similar to Tweetr, has good aesthetics but lacks on features, and Snitter, similar to Twhirl, has more features but isn’t as attractive. However the development of each of these apps isn’t as often as the others.