What is Twitterlicious? Is it somehow a delicious Twitter application? Well, according to ejecutive.co.uk; “Twitterlicious is a Windows application that makes using Twitter more fun. It handles all the hard work, leaving you to read and write tweets with minimum fuss. Best of all, Twitterlicious is free!” Free is a beautiful word to a broke college kid, so right off the bat, I'm liking how this Twitterlicious thing is shaping up.
For anyone ready to get downloading, Ejecutive is a dependable site, and it’s where I downloaded my version of Twitterlicious, so I can vouch for it.
But it’s not quite that simple. In order for Twitterlicious to work, you must first install Microsoft .NET, which is described on startvbdotnet.com as an “XML Web Services platform which allows us to build rich .NET applications, which allows users to interact with the Internet using wide range of smart devices (tablet devices, pocket PC's, web phones etc), which allows to build and integrate Web Services and which comes with many rich set of tools like Visual Studio to fully develop and build those applications.” Honestly, I’m not very familiar with this platform, so for a more detailed explanation, you can check out this link.
Now, where can we find Microsoft .NET? The best place (and the site I was directed to by Ejecutive) is msdn.microsoft.com.
All of these downloads are free, easy, and relatively quick, which makes this whole process pretty headache-free.
Ok, now on to more Twitterlicious information. The main benefits of this application are cited as:
- Small and concise UI, shows maximum amount of information in a minimum amount of space.
- Hides itself in the system tray when not needed, and pops up a notification balloon when there’s a new tweet.
- Displays the read status of each tweet, so you know which tweets are new and can see any that you’ve missed.
- Automatically refreshes itself at user-defined intervals.
- Properly threaded so it won’t lock up if Twitter.com is unresponsive.
- Support for authenticated web proxies.
It takes a little getting used to, but once you get rolling using the app, it does make things pretty easy. The best way to describe it is to liken it to AIM. It’s just a small box that sits in the upper left hand corner of your screen and can be minimized and maximized. No log-in required, because after your initial setup, all you need to do to activate the app is double click the icon. (As a quick side note, the prompt for Twitterlicious said that a shortcut to the app will appear on your desktop automatically. This wasn't the case for me, and I had to go into the C Drive and manually put a shortcut onto my desktop. I'm not saying it's a big deal, and I'm not too lazy to do it myself, but they said I was getting one automatically, and that didn't happen. Therefore Twitterlicious is a liar. Or it tells only "selective truths". Either way, I wouldn't let this application borrow my car or any money.)
Twitterlicious has a slew of options that make it very user-friendly and convenient. First of all, it has an automatic tweet refresh. You can change your automatic update time in the settings (accessible by clicking the little wrench icon in the lower left hand side) to refresh every 3, 5, 10, 30, or 60 minutes. You can also manually update by clicking the refresh icon in the lower left hand corner of the box.
You can choose if you want to show the Twitterlicious icon in your Windows task bar. The icon is a honey bee (I don’t really know why. Maybe because honey is “delicious” and bees “twitter about”……don’t they….?), and by double clicking it you open the application. It will stay displayed unless you click the X in the corner to minimize it. To maximize it, you can double click the honey bee icon or right click and choose “show”. You exit the application by right clicking the honey bee icon and choosing “exit”.
In the settings section, you can access the “credential” section as a sign-in. I haven’t yet figured out if you are constantly logged onto Twitter via this application, nor do I know if by clearing the credential queue, you are logged out.
You can also choose whether or not you want a bubble to display on your system tray every time it updates and new tweets come in. I recommend leaving the alert on, because when I turned it off, I kept forgetting that Twitterlicious was running on my system tray, and so my three-minute auto refreshes became a waste.
Now, on to the meat-and-potatoes. The entire point of this app is to make Twitter more convenient, so how do all the Twitter nuances transfer to this condensed application?
The first thing I wanted to know was how to @Reply. To @Reply, you can right-click the person’s tweet and choose “reply”, or simply double click their tweet. By right clicking, you also are given the options to:
o Send direct text
o Directly view the user’s website in Internet Explorer
o View a page of the person’s last tweet in Internet Explorer
o Mark a message as unread
o Mark all messages as read
@Replies that are directed at you are highlighted blue, making them easily recognizable in the rather long list of tweets in the window. This is a pretty drastic change from what you’re used to on the Twitter page, and it takes some getting used to. In fact this is one of the only things I wasn’t crazy about with this application. I felt that for all the neatness and organization they achieved, the @Reply concept hadn’t been totally ironed out yet.
You’ll also notice that nowhere on the page does it seem to show a character count for the tweet you are typing. Rest easy, friends. The “Go” button next to the text box begins a character count as soon as you start typing. When you’re ready to post, just click that same button, and your tweet is off and running in the twittersphere. Another cool feature is that, unlike the standard Twitter page, once you reach the character limit, you can’t type anymore.
Once you click a tweet, it becomes de-bolded. (I’m assuming this is a way to notify you that you’ve read this tweet.)
Another thing that takes a little adjusting to is the fact that the display names are users real names (or whatever you’ve put in as your “real name”), as opposed to the Twitter website where tweets are shown next to your Twitter name. So for example, on Twitter, my display name is “zachcaruso”, but my real name is Zach Caruso. On Twitterlicious, I show up as Zach Caruso.
There aren’t any clickable hyperlinks in this application, which was another draw back that I felt needed some work. In Twitterlicious, to see a link in a tweet, right click and choose “open link in browser”.
Twitterlicious is a great application for hardcore Twitter fans, or those who are looking for something a bit more convenient and compact, rather than a full browser screen worth of Twitter. It has its pros and cons, but in the end I would definitely recommend this application to anyone interested in trying it.
