15 Aug 2009

Changing Vienna to be a Twitter Client

I like Twitter, but I actually dislike most of the twitter clients. I don't think they are all bad, they just don't suit my needs.

For me they are:
- one more thing to open up and look at
- resource-heavy (thinking of the ones built on AIR)
- not easy to scan long lists of tweets to find one I want to read

I have Eventbox from Macheist but they have locked me into the beta version they released at the time, which was buggy and not fully-featured. I'll admit that put me in a foul mood about the software, those bundles should be an alternate way to get your software purchased and building an audience, not a way to convince people to install and get hooked on pre-release software.

Recently I started using Vienna again for feedreading. Vienna is a Mac-only RSS reader; I had stopped using Vienna when I started using NetNewsWire both on my Mac and on my iPhone, but now that NNW has undergone changes (one being ads) I decided to try the open-source, ad-free VIenna again.

Here's what my interface looks like with Twitter (and some of my other social networks:
Viennafortwitter

I like that tweets fit on one line, it is easy to scan the first few words to see if I want to read the rest, and I can easily see 35 tweets without scrolling.

It's also pretty easy to manage lists. I have a group folder called User feeds that I can use to create individual feed lists -- for example Chris Pirillo above. (The way it works is it will actually find anything with ChrisPirillo in it, but that is OK for me.

The last thing I needed was to be able to retweet from Vienna. Vienna is extensible to be able to run scripts but it also is open source, so I just downloaded the source and made changes to the code. I can now retweet an article, or simply clear the retweet box and tweet anything I want:

All in all it's been a fun experiment. The code needs a little work - right now I am hardcoding the username and it pulls the password from my Keychain, I'll look into a preference to request the username and still use the keychain for the password - but it works for my needs.

(download)