Why does Twitter suck?
This morning, my manager asked if I used Twitter at all. While I have an account, and I have a bunch of 'Friends' on there, my attention span for the service has never really lasted much longer than 2-3 days. Every time someone asks me about it, I grab a client or two, try things out, and realize yet again how many things really annoy me about the service. The top two were how much of a pain it was to post, and what a bigger pain it was to keep a feed going. The best I could find for OS X was Twitterrific, and it was just counterintuitive. The free version would put ads in, the 'auto reappear' never did, and it would just silently fail half the time and not post anything new for hours. Awesomesauce.
Granted, a few things have been fixed. The SMS posting service makes it really easy to actually post remotely, as none of the S60 clients are very good, and the Java clients really suck. They don't seem to be down as much, and the speed isn't terrible. Rumor has it, they're getting rid of Ruby on Rails, which just makes me jump with glee.
Since then, for posting, someone put together an AppleScript called Tweet, which allows you to easily post to Twitter through QuickSilver. It works well for me, I just hit Command-Space, hit period, type my tweet, tab, then tweet it. It sounds complicated, but it's really easy to deal with. I like it, and it was easy as hell to do.
Then, there's the feed problem. RSS is too slow, I don't want it cluttering up Google Reader. Twitterrific still isn't working for me, as pretty as it is. There are two Dashboard modules, and neither of them work well, and silently fail at that. What I really wanted was something that would just post tweets to Growl and be done with it. I found something, but it was a Ruby script with manual configuration and little extensibility. I didn't want to screw with it, so off to /dev/null it went.
Hey, there's a point.
In the end, I wrote a perl script called TwitterGrowl to do exactly what I want it to do. To make life easier, it relies on the Twitter login information in your keychain to log in, and prompts you to create one if it doesn't find anything. It reports when there's a login failure, or Twitter goes into Suckfest, or when a system maintenance issue is posted. Better yet, I packaged it up into an easy to use, double clickable application. Pop it into your Applications folder, drag it to your Login Items, and it'll go into the background and sign in when you log in. Easy as pie. All of the required modules are in the application package, and you can feel free to browse the source by viewing the package contents and heading into the Resources folder.
So, now that I have a steady "works for me", would anyone else like to give it a shot and see if anything breaks? Comment here with any issues or comments you find, and if no one posts, it either works great or I am a total failure. :)
TwitterGrowl 0.1 (Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5, Universal)
