This review of Mac OS X dashboard widgets all came from my failure to figure out how to change the account details in Twitteriffic . Twitteriffic served well for a while but when we moved over to the new name and site, we needed a twitter name to match and wanted to change. No dice. Tried deleting prefs, looking high and low for a hidden button, somewhere, anywhere to do this. None to be found. Another frustration was that Twitteriffic kept losing it's connection and then would bring itself to the front and selected application. So you would be typing away in word (or doing whatever) and it would make you switch to Twitteriffic and click the box to confirm the error. I found a setting to turn this off in the end but it was too late, the search for a simple and easy way to update to twitter had already begun.

I wanted simple. Nothing popping up all the time to interrupt what I am doing but also easily accessible to use any time. So, without further ado.. I present the three contenders. Twitgit , Twidgit and the awkwardly named Twitterlex .

Twitgit (#3 in the screenshots above and below) threw us off as to set it up it was asking for your email. We didn’t know what email we signed up with so tried our twitter account along with the password anyway. It worked in the end. It first comes up with a whole list of yours and your friend’s tweets. Then after you enter a tweet, yours is only there. Couldn’t work out how to get the timeline back. One good thing that was nice though is that your twitter ID was highlighted in that last post you made and you can go directly to your twitter page on the web. One other thing that I noticed is that when you update from another client or channel, Twitgit doesn’t get the update. So unless you update in Twitgit, then you can’t see what your last post was. One last thing that was missing in Twitgit was the countdown for the number of characters you have left in your 140 character post. For the reasons above plus some unknown reason, I just didn’t like Twitgit. Next please!

Twidget (#1 in the screenshots below) was the most simple and easy of the three widgets. You enter your twitter username and password, click done and your are ready to go. You are presented with an empty box and a countdown to how many characters you have left (although for some reason it counts down from 153 instead of 140). You just type in your tweet, click update and you are done. On this one some of your last post is above the text entry box so you can see what you said. The bad part is that you can not click on your username to goto your account on the web. Another downside was that the latest post didn’t update when you update from other clients. Despite the very minor downfalls, at this point I thought Twidget was going to be the one. Until..

Twitterlex (#2 in pics below) came along. During testing we noticed that our own tweets from the web and the other two were appearing almost instantly in Twitterlex. It seemed to be much more ‘aware’ in fetching the tweets. It just seemed nicer to have a smarter client. It is not perfect of course though. I was not really sure about what it should be displaying and when. My latest posts were clickable and I could go to my web twitter page but those were soon replaced by my friends tweets (which I didn’t mind). It also was the only one of the three to have a refresh button which is nice. The other nifty feature was support for growl. I use growl for many things and it is great. For twitter, it is too much for me though and it was starting to annoy. This was easily fixed by going into growl properties and turning Twitterlex growl off.

Twitterlex is the winner in this round. We will wait and see what comes out of the other corners for their next releases.

Review of Twitterific 2.0 - Twitter Client for Mac OS X
We were looking for a better way to update via Twitter and thought we would try out the new release of Twitterific version 2.0. From when we first installed it we noticed the effort they put into the classy interface design and it felt right at home along with our other mac applications. Install and setup was easy and all we had to do was enter our Twitter account information and it instantly hooked up and got our "tweets".


Preferences

The preferences screen is as expected and lets you change some settings in Twitterific. You can decide to view your friends list or the public page, the frequency of tweets refresh, set notifications (visual and sound), window preferences an set a hot key to toggle the window. Screenshot below.

The Main Window

The Main Twitterific window is super easy to use and you can see your own tweets as well as your friend's. On each tweet dialouge there are three small icons that let you 1. goto that user's twitter page on twitter.com. 2. goto that user's personal webpage and 3. you can mark that tweet as a favorite. Below the tweets is
an area for you to update directly to your account at Twitter. It counts down the number of characters you have left (messages are 140 characters max). A cool feature is that if you enter a long URL, it gets turned into a short url automatically. On the left of the text entry box there are a couple of buttons, home icon goes to the Twitter website, there is a wrench icon that opens the preferences and there is a refresh button. Another cool thing is that the Mac OS X spell check works inside of Twitterific (as you can see in the screenshot below). If you mis-spell a word just right click it and select the correct spelling as usual.

Stability

Overall Twitterific was very stable and has not crashed in the last 3 days that we have been using it. There has been periodic loss of connection but we are not sure if that is due to the Twitter service, Twitterific or our Internet connection.

Conclusion

We are happy with Twitterific and will keep using it as our Mac OS X client. The only other thing we wish it had is the ability to see your list of friends and favorites like on the twitter web page. Another bonus would be the ability to link XML and RSS feeds to your Twitter account directly from Twitterific. Other than that, congrats on a nice clean and simple to use app from the Icon Factory. We look forward to future releases. Twitterific!

Here is a list of Twitterific 2.0 features from their website:

* Clean, concise UI with small desktop footprint
* Auto refreshing at user defined intervals
* Highlights tweets that are unread
* Auto show / hide when new tweets arrive
* Control over window layering and priority
* Single click access to user profile pages
* Switch between friend and public tweets easily
* Keyboard shortcuts for list navigation and more
* Menubar app that doesn't take up Dock space
* Audio notification for new tweets
* Hotkey to show / hide tweets