One of the big bits of news out today was the release this morning of an updated version of TweetDeck. Now I realize that this is the darling Twitter app everyone just loves to use and for the most part I can see why.

The way the columns are added for the different timelines and services is nice and easy. Each of the columns have individual options – depending on the service. For Twitter related columns the two really handy options are:

Popular

This option lets you see what popular tags and names are the most popular.

When you select the Popular button a small panel will be displayed at the bottom of the column showing the popular items.

Clicking the Popular button will close it.

Filter

I know myself there have been times where I’ve gone looking for a specific message so this is a nice feature to have. Just click on the Filter button

This will open up the Filter panel for the column which is where you can select whether you want to filter based on: text, name, source, or time. Then as you enter in the say the text to search for the list will update based on what you have typed so far.

I can really see why people really like TweetDeck but there are still some things about that irritate me to the point that TweetDeck won’t be becoming my principal Twitter client at this point.

One of the major reasons is it’s lack of spam filters which is something that I really liked about using bDule, or rather Sobees Lite as it has been renamed. Being able to filter out some of the more irritating Twitter crap (Spymaster and other such stuff) makes for a more enjoyable time using Twitter.

Along with that being a major deal breaker for me the way that TweetDeck handles notifications could do with some fine tuning. On the whole it’s not bad but what would be really nice it to be able to get notifications based on keywords, individual followers, or even if a trending topic is hitting your timeline.

Now the rest of these points are all minor but added together, regardless of how picky they might seem, are reasons why I’ll be taking a pass on TweetDeck at this point.

The big one – font size! Like come on people just how hard is it to add in the option to let us select the size of font we want to use for stuff to be displayed in. This has always been my major bitch point when it comes to Twitter clients – when are you developers gonna realize that not everyone has 20/20 vision.

New message notification – I’m sorry but using a gray scaled dot down at the bottom of the post where it basically blends into the background is a useful way to let me know that I have new messages. As well wouldn’t it kinda make sense to remove that dot from messages once some new ones have been received?

The other thing that is an irritant is having the name of the person sending the message at the bottom. I really dislike having to first scan to the bottom of the message to find out who it is from and then reading the message. Would it really be that difficult to have it at the beginning of the message where it would flow more naturally?

There are a lot of things about TweetDeck that make it a nice Twitter client to use and I can see why it is popular, however they aren’t enough to outweigh the points I have mentioned.

Maybe next time.

TweetDeck teardown is a post from: The Inquisitr

I make a lot of fun about the number of Twitter clients that are churned out at a non-stop pace equating to a modern “Hello World” programming exercise. I have also tried most of them as either new ones are made available or existing ones are updated. One can get kind of blasè about them all after a little while but every once in awhile some nice comes along.

Such is the case with the newest client to hit the web from Sobees called bDule. This client however is for Windows users only who have the .NET framework installed which will limit its appeal to a point. With that disclaimer out of the way bDule is a rather interesting client in that it supports both Twitter and now Facebook and it allows you to select from a wide array of templates to display your timelines in.

When you run the client for the first time you will see this template selection dialog (which you can change later)

Once you have selected the template you want to use the main user dialog will be displayed allowing you to now select what you want displayed in each of the different parts of the dialog. In this one I selected a typical email panel display and loaded up Twitter in the largest of the three panes

Then added a Twitter search panel at the top right

And finally I added in my Facebook credentials for the last available pane

I decided to try another layout to see how it looked but this time selected one that put the Twitter search along the bottom of the display

The only unfortunate thing with bDule is that is suffers from the same memory hogging that we are use to with the AIR Twitter clients. Sobees’ does say that this is only an Alpha release so time will tell if they can get a handle on the problem and bring the memory under control.

Other than that this looks like a rather interesting addition to the ever growing repository of Twitter, and now Facebook, clients.

[hat tip to Go2Web20]

A Windows Twitter & Facebook client to watch is a post from: The Inquisitr

At the end of January I wrote of a new Windows Twitter client called *chirp over on my home blog and other than a few things that took it out of the realm of being a primetime client for Twitter I thought it was pretty good for a first release. One of the comments made amongst those who tried was the name of the application itself. As well much was made of the lack of keyboard shortcut options with the client and was one of the reason why I felt it wasn’t ready for prime time.

It seems that the developers behind the client have been listening as they released a new version of the client under a new name – blu. Now I’m not sure if that is really much of an improvement but it does tie in nicely with the application’s colour scheme. the major user interface improvement though has to be the addition of some minor but important keyboard shortcuts which were sorely missing from the previous release. Now you can scroll through the list of tweets using the typical up and down arrows as well as the page up and page down. The only other thing I would really like to see added is a separate display area for @reply tweets such as you find in Twhirl.

So if you’re in the market for a new Twitter client you might want to give blu a shot after all it is a pretty sweet looking desktop app.

Chirp gets a new name and some improvements is a post from: The Inquisitr