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.

Some of you may have noticed the mini posts section in the white sidebar which arrived almost a fortnight ago, has gone by a few different names and has had no explanation until now. My problem was that I needed something to put into the sidebar to replace the gallery photos which weren’t working correctly anymore and at the same time I was also considering starting a Twitter account.

I’d heard of Twitter but in the past I didn’t really see the point in using something that would only let you make one hundred and forty character posts which seemed too small to say anything really useful so I never bothered to sign up. Recently however I have been wanting to post little comments about films that I have been watching or books that I’m reading but the posts were so small that it didn’t seem like it was worth the effort.

Twitter seemed like the perfect tool for doing this as it meant that I could make my small posts which solved that problem and then using V.J.Catkick’s Twitter plugin for WordPress also solve my empty sidebar problem. The other good thing about this is not only can I do the mini posts but I can also do a quick post which can be expanded upon later with a proper blog post or use it for news about upcoming posts etc.

So  that is why there is now the mini post section in the sidebar and the only reason that I’ve not mentioned it before is because I wanted to make sure that I’d be making it a permanent feature first.

Lastly if you’d like to subscribe to my Twitter feed you can do so here.