Twitterific vs. twhirl
After returning to work last week, I was forced to come up with a new method for posting to Twitter. On my Macbook, I use a combination of Twitterific from Iconfactory and the Twitter home page. Now that I have to use Windows XP once again, I was forced to look for an alternative for when at work.
Since Twitter debuted early in 2006, a whole lot of options to connect to this service have become available. I had used Snitter on Windows in the past but decided to give twhirl a try. I was pleasantly surprised. So surprised in fact, that I installed it on my Macbook when I got home, just to give it a try. I have definitely tired—like a lot of others—with Twitters inconsistent uptime over the past months. Add to that the endless error messages in Twitterific and I was ready for a better experience.
So here is a comparison of two of the more popular Twitter clients.
Twitterific
| Positives | Negatives |
|---|---|
| Great user interface—I loves me some HUD style applications. | Persistent and annoying error messages. |
| Behaves like a native OS X application, with some additional options. | Only available on OS X. |
| Includes option for no dock icon. | Can only view 20 previous tweets in your timeline at startup. Not conducive to catching up on tweets if you’ve been away. |
twhirl
| Positives | Negatives |
|---|---|
| API throttler—seems to do a good job of making sure you only request as much as Twitter can handle. | No built in spell check. That’s more a complaint of Windows, but it would be nice if the twhirl developers had added this feature. |
| Works on OS X and Windows XP\Vista. | On OS X, does not follow OS X application behavior. |
| Allows user to update Pownce and Jaiku accounts with Twitter updates. | Does not include an option for no dock icon. |
This comparison is not exhaustive. But these were the features or traits that are important to me or that got my attention right away.
After a week of comparing, I’ve decided to stick with Twitterific on my Macbook. Even though the error messages are frustrating, they just aren’t reason enough to switch. twhirl is a decent enough implementation, but it’s not a Mac application. So for now it’s Twitterific on the Mac, twhirl on Windows and the Twitter web interface thrown in from time to time.
It’s good to have choices.
