2008/04/11

Twitterrific notes

I’ve been using Twitterrific for a while now as my Twitter client. There’s no huge reason, really, that the web interface isn’t just fine, but a dedicated client is nice for a few reasons, such as: polling for updates, albeit bad for productivity; shortcuts for replying; a more compact interface; and so on.

I don’t have time to write extensively about any of my wish-list, so a bulleted list will have to do. Here are a few of features that, individually or together, could make Twitterrific even better:

  • Own posts are automatically marked as “read”.
  • “Favourited” tweets are indicated visually (or at the very least the action of favourite-ing them is indicated; I’ve got many favourite posts by mistake trying to hit CMD-2 to reply and missing).
  • Last read message is remembered so that relaunching Twitterrific doesn’t result in 40-odd unread tweets. (Alternatively, simply zero-ing the unread counter on launch.)
  • On that note, it would be even better if it could track back through the pages of unread tweets until it found where I was up to; currently when I wake up my ’puter in the morning there’ll be way more tweets that I’ve missed than Twitterrific gives me.
  • The input text box grows with my text rather than fixed to a certain height.
  • Less UI preferences. You guys are good designers! No need to ask us if the window should have a drop shadow or not.
  • Auto tinyurl (or snurl, or …) of pasted links.
  • Auto-expanding tinyurl-ed links.
  • Auto-completion of followers’ handles when manually typing replies to them (say there aren’t any of their actual tweets currently visible).
  • Perhaps: ability to un-follow people.

Now, I’m sure some of these suggestions are technically unfeasible due to network latency/efficiency. But without thinking too hard about the underlying technicalities, I think it’s not a bad list. So what have I left off?