Ejecutive

Facebook has ironically caved into all the social pressure from disgruntled users and removed the ‘is’ they force on status updates. Before, you had to follow the not so flexible “[name] is…” format, and with just a few exceptions, only verbs could really follow on after that. Now, you can put anything you like after your name, “[name] loves boys” being the current most popular choice for those who have a weak password.

Getting rid of that ‘is’ was like lifting the shackles off a straight jacket (err, don’t ask how I can make that comparison), you’re now open to the wonderful world that is using adjectives without making something so grammatically laughable that even a pig would snort at it.

So, what has Twitter got to offer now eh? Why bother with this medieval farm boy’s choice of status update tool now that Facebook has set it’s statuses free? Eh well, for one thing people have to be registered on Facebook to be able to track your statuses, there is no RSS feed, although there is an API with a few apps written to update you, they pale in comparison to the apps written for Twitter. And as soon as they removed one limitation, it’s immediately replaced by another by forcing you to start every update with your name.

I can see why they would want to keep those status updates in check by forcing you to make them about yourselves, but then it also removes all the community that you get from Twitter. With Twitter, people are supposed to react to tweets by posting their own tweets, sometimes as a direct response. Tweets are more than just a status update; they’re a conversion, a discussion, or even just spouting of random filth like how the slightly and twitchy sadistic kid at school used to. It allows you to do something that is socially unacceptable: to utter random thoughts that fly into your head and bitch about things no one else cares about. And while some of Facebook statuses carry the same sense of randomness, the majority fall into the toilet bowl that is repetitive boredom.

That is why I use Twitter.

Its been a long road, taking almost six months of on-and-off work to complete, but now I feel comfortable in releasing the full release of Twitterlicious 2.0. No more betas or release candidates, this is the real deal!

Download Twitterlicious 2.0 final.

A brief recap about Twitterlicious:

Twitterlicious is a small app that makes using Twitter more fun. It handles all the hard work, leaving you to read and write tweets with the minimum fuss. Best of all, Twitterlicious is free!

Compare to how Twitterlicious 1.2 looked.

A big thanks to all the beta testers for all your feedback, you’ve made Twitterlicious into what it is today and its better for it. If I were more organised, I would have a list of all your name, but I think you all know who you are.

Make sure you subscribe to the feed (or a feed for posts only about Twitterlicious), but it would be nice to keep you as a regular reader on Ejecutive.)”: to keep up to date with developments with Twitterlicious and other projects, you can also follow me on Twitter.

After such a long time working on one side project, its left me a little jaded with Twitterlicious, so for now its just going to be minor features and bug fixes (keep those reports and requests coming in). I’m going to focus my attention on going back to my final year of university and some other side projects I have going. I’ve also neglected Ejecutive recently with the frequency of posts, and I have a plan to fix that too, and maybe spruce up the archives a little.

But don’t think for a second that Twitterlicious is dead, I’ve started to look at learning Windows Presentation Foundation, and Twitterlicious seems an ideal candidate to experiment with. So the future is bright.

Change Log

The major changes since Twitterlicious 1.2:

• Each tweet is now shown in its entirety in the list instead of just showing the selected tweet at the top.
• The read status of each individual tweet is remembered and displayed, even after you close the app!
• You can follow people who’ve replied to you and direct messages, as well as the standard friends timeline.
• Each tweet list is capable of holding the past 50 tweets.
• You now get automatically notified if there is an update to Twitterlicious.
• The update text box is resizable and multiline, as is the whole app window.
• Support for authenticated proxy servers — for the people who are using Twitterlicious on work time!
• Nifty context menus (right click) in the tweet lists.
• Tweets now show up as from Twitterlicious on Twitter.com (example).
• A bunch of shortcuts:
  • Ctrl + W: minimise the Twitterlicious main window.
  • Ctrl + R: manually refresh the lists.
  • Ctrl + K: mark all tweets in the current list as read.
  • Ctrl + Return: send update (same as clicking “Go”).
  • Ctrl + L: opens the link in the selected tweet in a browser window.
  • Ctrl + U: marks the current selected tweet as unread.
  • Ctrl + D: sends a direct text to the selected tweet’s user.
  • Ctrl + E: replys to the selected tweet (@username).
  • Ctrl + B: view the selected tweet in the browser.
  • Ctrl + T: view the selected tweet’s user’s website.

Changes since Twitterlicious 2.0 RC1:

• Faster and more reliable connection to Twitter.
• Option to improve friends list update speed by reducing the frequency of the replies and direct message updates.
• Option to hide Twitterlicious from the Windows taskbar.
• Option to hide the direct messages list (improves speed).
• Spanking new about box.

Twitterlicious 2.0 has been in the works for a while now and is taking a lot longer than I expected. You got a small taste of what’s to come in the 1.2 release, but here’s a preview of the completely redesigned interface in 2.0:

I’ve finally managed to implement a list with in-line twits reliably, which makes the interface far more powerful and simple in the process. Stay tuned for the inevitable beta release.

Twitterlicious is a small Windows app that makes Twitter much easier to use.

I was impressed by Twitterific, and when working on my MacBook I used it exclusively for reading Twitter updates and writing. But when I’m at work I have to use a Windows machine, and looking around I couldn’t find a Windows Twitter client that worked the way I wanted it to, so I made one myself.

It tries to be as un-obtrusive as possible, hiding itself in the system tray until needed and it’s multi-threaded which allows multiple requests to be sent and received from Twitter at the same time to increase responsiveness.

You can find out more about Twitterlicious and download it for free on it’s project page, and by all means do give me a shout if you have any questions or suggestions.