April 12, 2011 · Web Software Reviews ·

For the past few weeks, I have been using ChromeDeck (the native Tweetdeck application for the Google Chrome browser) fairly exclusively as my desktop Twitter client. I am very pleased with the application, and am extremely impressed at how similar the appearance is to the desktop app. There are a lot of neat features that you won’t find in the full-fledged desktop version; but there are also a few features I used regularly in the AIR application that I sorely miss in the Chrome version.

April 11, 2010 · Web News ·

The Web has been all abuzz over the last few days about the fact that Twitter has officially purchased the Tweetie iPhone Twitter client from its creator. This acquisition brings to mind a few questions:

1. How is a group/company with no obvious source of income (other than investors) purchasing a commercial venture, and, how are they able to make it free (are they going to introduce advertisements)?
2. What does this mean for other Twitter clients that are being developed for the iPhone? Will Twitbird, Tweetdeck and Echofon (formerly TwitterFon) fall off the face of the planet now that an official Twitter client has been chosen? Granted, Tweetdeck and Echofon are both diversified enough that losing the iPhone market will most likely not break them, but it still does not bode well; nor does it bode well for the spirit of competition and race to features currently found in the App Store.
3. What does this mean for customers that already purchased the Tweetie iPhone client at full price? If advertisements are injected into the free version offered by Twitter, will paid customers have the option to opt out of those? Will there be any compensation or incentives for those that paid for the app?

What are your thoughts? What does this mean for the future of Twitter clients on the iPhone? Will the other clients go the way of non-bit.ly URL shortening services?

July 8, 2009 · Software ·

I updated my home computer the other day, installing the latest 64-bit version of Linux Mint. This is my first foray into regularly using a 64-bit version of Linux, so I was not really prepared for some of the issues I experienced. Most of my issues (Amarok not working properly) were easily solved by simply adding some of the default Ubuntu repositories that are disabled by default in Mint.

However, I still had problems getting Adobe AIR and TweetDeck (or Seesmic Desktop, for that matter) to work correctly. After a bit of searching, I found that this is because Adobe hasn’t released a 64-bit version of Adobe AIR, and 64-bit Linux isn’t really prepared, out-of-the-box, to handle the 32-bit version.

I found an article in the Adobe knowledgebase explaining how to get Adobe AIR installed. Unfortunately, the link to the getlibs package in that article is outdated, and it was really difficult to find the real location of that file. I finally found it. This is, apparently, only a termporary location for the package, so I don’t know where it will end up afterwards. There is a topic in the Ubuntu forums where the location is discussed.

June 20, 2009 · Software · Web 2.0 ·

There are a handful of various desktop applications that can be used to track Twitter on your computer. In this article, I will be comparing two of those applications: Seesmic Desktop and TweetDeck. For the purposes of this review, I am using TweetDeck 0.6.2 and Seesmic Desktop 0.2.1.

On the surface, both applications are very similar. Listed below are some of the general features you’ll find in both TweetDeck and Seesmic.

June 7, 2009 · Software · Web News ·

TweetDeck is a free application available for Linux, Mac and Windows (through the Adobe Air application) that allows you to keep track of Twitter in real time, without having to visit (and constantly reload) the Web site.

In addition, TweetDeck offers the ability to keep track of the latest status updates from your Facebook friends.