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.