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The BIG Reason

Music, opinions, and portfolio of Mark Eagleton, musician and web developer in Northern CA.

Twitterrific = Twitterrible

Twitter is all the rage. I've had an account for about a week. While I personally find it distracting and somewhat egocentric, I still see its benefits and feel obligated to give it a fair try. The iconfactory just released a freeware app called Twitterific that lets you tweet (post) and stream the tweets of your friends in a cute little floating window. Unlike most things released by the iconfactory, it's not quite up to snuff.

UPDATE See Craig's comment below for additional tips and an explanation of some of their design decisions. I'm now enjoying Twitterrific much more, now that I got it working properly.

Twitter is all the rage. I've had an account for about a week. While I personally find it distracting and somewhat egocentric, I still see its benefits and feel obligated to give it a fair try. The iconfactory just released a freeware app called Twitterific that lets you tweet (post) and stream the tweets of your friends in a cute little floating window. Unlike most things released by the iconfactory, it's not quite up to snuff.

The instructions say Twitterific will prompt you for your profile information when you first launch it. It doesn't. At least not for me. I have followed the instructions on iconfactory's site. Logged out of my account, downloaded, installed, un-installed, and reinstalled to no avail. There seems to be no other place in the application to manually input your profile information.

Eventually, I tricked the app into prompting me for my profile by setting it to check tweets from my friend list. Most of my friends aren't web developers, so they aren't on twitter. There was no reason for me to set this preference by default.

Twitterific puts an icon in your menu bar that does nothing but show and hide the Twitterific window. Helpful things to add to this menu might be the option to quit it, maybe access to a preferences pane where you could modify your account information.

For the record, I call it Twitterrible because it sounds cute. Twitterific isn't terrible, it's just not nearly as good as I expected it to be.

UPDATE 2 Looks like I wasn't alone in my confusion. I'm telling you, preferences should contain your account info. This is the first place people look.