Wibtown

blu screen grab, click to enlarge

Since I started to use Twitter I’ve noticed that there are a lot of desktop clients around all of which have different levels of features and usability but if you’re simply after something that will let you read and reply to tweets whilst looking good at the same time you won’t go far wrong with blu which is a product of Thirteen23. blu has been designed with Windows Vista and Windows 7 in mind but it will work with XP so long as you have .NET 3.5 installed.

The design is nice and clean with the majority of the blu window being taken up by the tweets that you subscribe to along with some large icons at the bottom whose function should be obvious just by looking at them. It also fits in very well with the design of Windows Vista with a slightly transparent look to it but if you don’t like that it can be altered in the settings.

One of the first things you might notice is a lack of a scroll bar which seemed a little strange at first but it does help to keep everything looking less cluttered and scrolling can be taken care of by using the mouse wheel, the arrow keys or page up and page down so it’s no big loss. The Twitter servers are checked for new tweets every two to twenty two minutes depending on your preferences and new tweets will appear at the top of the list whilst giving you an audible nudge to let you know they have arrived.

Posting a tweet is simply a matter of hitting reply or update to open the entry window which also contains a handy character counter and the ability to convert a URL into a TinyURL to save on space. This however does lead me to my first problem as for some reason it only works when a URL is pasted into the window rather than typed and as I found out it won’t work at all if Zonealarm is blocking the TinyURL website which isn’t blu’s fault but I thought that I should mention it just in case you’re having that problem.

Secondly the favourites system doesn’t seem to be working correctly at the moment as any profile that you add to it is lost when the program is closed which for me isn’t much of a problem for me but again I thought that I should mention it.

As I said at the beginning of this if all you want is a simple to use and good looking program to keep up with your tweets then I don’t think that you can go far wrong with blu.

If you fancy giving the new Windows 7 Beta a go you can sign up and download it here. Give it a try a let me know what you think.

Some of you may remember the asteroid impact video that I posted awhile back which was great but the aspect ratio was wrong and the quality wasn’t brilliant. Luckily there is now a HD version available on Youtube for us all to enjoy, just remember to click the HD button.

Now this is a bit weird, it’s a video of a black liquid called a ferrofluid that reacts to the presence of a magnetic field. I’d go into detail about how it all works but I didn’t really understand the wikipedia entry so to make it simple black fluid creates pretty shapes when near magnet.

If you’d like to try something like this yourself just Google for ferrofluid as it’s not too expensive and could be fun to play around with.

No words needed, well apart from those ones plus it is a shame about the aspect ratio and the spelling mistake near the end. Apart from all that though no words needed.

Anybody know where I can find the original video?