Show “twitter” — inside Habbie's mind

Entries tagged “twitter”

twitter clients, redux

written by peter, on Jul 4, 2011 8:38:00 AM.

With the demise of Nambu into no-DM-territory, I am looking for a new Mac OS X Twitter client again. This time, no reviews, just short (rejection) notes.

Nambu: lost DM support last week. No streaming. Often errors during refresh. Otherwise, best client ever.
Twitter.app: looks like shit. Does not work with HyperDock. Can’t find the keyboard shortcut to switch accounts.
Echofon: looks like utter shit. Multiple account support seems hackish.
Kiwi : looks good but is extremely buggy. Frequently fails to load (or display) timelines or DMs at all.
YoruFukurou: terrible name. Reasonable looks. Acceptable keyboard shortcuts. Streaming support. Multi-account support at least has working notifications. I’m sticking with YoruFukurou for now.

silly Python unicode mistake

written by peter, on Jun 12, 2010 7:58:00 AM.

For a simple blog-to-twitter posting gateway (source code) I’m relying on the excellent feedparser and twitter modules, and I am trusting them to handle unicode strings without trouble. With most well-written Python modules (and these two are no exception!) methods will return unicode strings as they see fit, and other methods will accept these unicode strings and handle all the nitty gritty encoding details for me.

A simplified version of my workflow would look like this:

def post(entry):
  title = entry.title
  print "posting [%s]" % title
  api.PostUpdate(title) # api is a twitter Api object

feed = feedparser.parse(config["feed"])
for e in reversed(feed.entries):
  if not e.id in seen:
    post(e)

This code bombed out with an exception on the first post that had a non-ASCII title. Can you spot why?

It’s the print statement. All the APIs I’m using have zero trouble with unicode, but print wants to encode for your terminal and it’ll usually assume that that is ASCII. My ‘debugging’ output actually broke the program. My workaround is to say title.encode("ascii","replace")

Brend on #python pointed out to me that the issue is not, exactly, print. The issue is interpolating title into a non-unicode string. Depending on environment, using print on the unicode object might in fact work. For those environments, saying print u"posting [%s]" % title could help. In my case however, I ran into the issue from cron with no locale set at all, so dumbing the string down to ascii is still the right thing to do.

Mac desktop Twitter client roundup

written by peter, on Jun 11, 2010 1:10:00 PM.

I’ve been a Tweetie 1/Mac user for a long time now, and it has suited my needs well. However, there are minor annoyances. After Twitter acquired Tweetie developer Atebits, posts from Tweetie/Mac started showing up as posted from ‘Twitter for iPhone’. Also, Tweetie has semi-excellent keyboard navigation support but it’s too buggy, making me grab my mouse/touchpad in annoyance very frequently. Given the sheer amount of Twitter clients available, I asked my friends on Twitter and Facebook to suggest some options. Here are my biased opinions on the suggestions. I would like to thank all who contributed!

Kiwi

Kiwi looks and feels like it really wants to be Tweetie - but it’s nowhere close. Scrolling is jerky and the free version is much more annoying than the occasional ad in Tweetie.

Echofon

Echofon was recommended to me as ‘very minimal yet complete’ and it is. For single account usage, Echofon is basically on par with Tweetie for usability, including keyboard navigation. However, multiple account support seems hackish - events in one account are very hard to notice when focused on another account. This is one thing Tweetie gets absolutely right.

If I only had one account to manage, I could seriously consider switching to Echofon.

Nambu

Nambu is a bit fuller-featured in the UI department than the clients above, including Tweetie. Keyboard navigation is better than Tweetie (although it lacks some shortcuts) and about as buggy. Like Echofon, single account usage is great, and Nambu has some features I really dig, like thumbnails on twitpic-posts. Multiple account support in Nambu is excellent, with a choice between combining all timelines, and having them separated with use of a sidebar. Enabling the sidebar pops out an interface that resembles a cross between Tweetie and Mail.app, very clean.

If Echofon or Tweetie seem limited or minimal, Nambu is a great choice.

Note that adding an account to Nambu means you suddenly follow two extra accounts (@nambu and the developer). The checkbox to disable this behaviour doesn’t seem to work. Spammy if you ask me.

TweetDeck

On first startup, TweetDeck is very daunting. It more than fills my 13″ MacBook screen which is too much. I know that TweetDeck is -very- configurable but I did not feel up to the task. Additionally, TweetDeck notifications are not handled via Growl.

Yoono

Yoono, like TweetDeck, immediately took over my screen with absolutely nothing, asking me to configure my ‘columns’ from scratch. Too much hassle.

Conclusion

After trying all these clients I went back to Tweetie. It may not be perfect but I’m too used to it. I’ll probably switch to Nambu sometime soon. Both Echofon and Nambu I will recommend to people when asked for Twitter client advice.

Update July 12th: I’ve switched to Nambu and I’m not switching back. Keyboard navigation is excellent (although a bit buggy at times). I do miss Tweetie’s Command-U to look at a specific user, but otherwise Nambu seems superior in many ways. I’ve updated the Nambu review above to account for bugfixes they made since.

inside Habbie's mind