Gwibber vs. Choqok

And why I’m going with Choqok, even in Unity.

I upgraded to the new Gwibber.  For the most part, it’s great.  BUT, there are some really niggling issues I have with it.  List time!

• I can’t access my lists.  Or, I don’t see an easy way to do this.
• Slow.  So so so slow.  Once it starts up, it’s not bad, but it sometimes will hang my entire laptop.  I thought the updates were supposed to remove these issues.  Although they’ve been fewer recently.
• Two clicks to reply to a notice.  Not a huge deal, but now I have to click on the twitter/statusnet icon and then click reply.

Now, only to be fair, onto what I like about it:

• The new look.  Wow, looks great!
• Ubuntu integration.  This couldn’t be better.
• Speed improvements (note that this is under the issues as well… It’s in both because it’s better than it was, but not where it really shoiuld be.).

Now,even with all of the KDE libs, Choqok seems to run faster and easier on both my netbook and my laptop.  It has decent integration with my Unity desktop, goog.l shortening, pictures inline, and the ability to have my lists open so I can see what’s going on.  Oh, and now KDE apps seem to integrate better with Gnome because of QT, so that’s nice.

I really miss the easy-to-see lists feature that the old Gwibber had.  I wish they’d bring back the interface they had becuase it was awesome, and almost perfect.  Not necessarily the prettiest, but it worked really well.

I’m not saying “bring back the old interface” because that’s pretty much impossible right now, but maybe the devs could bring back some of its functionality.  I’m not sure what they wanted to accomplish with making the lists feature more hidden, but it’s made me kind of frustrated.

Now, I’ll go back to Gwibber.  For sure.  I’ll see if there are updates, and definitely give it another go when iti does update.  I’d love to have it working again the way I need.

For now, I’ll be using Choqok.

The problem with Gwibber: Tyler Rant (My Thoughts)

The problem with Gwibber Tyler Rant.

Ok.

There are too many comments to really post much more to the original article, so I’ll comment here.

I like Gwibber. I’ve been using it since it first came out and I started using microblogging services (twitter, identi.ca, etc).  It’s had problems and growing pains, but that’s expected with a new piece of software that is working with new technology (that’s always changing, btw; twitter changes its API all the time).

Complaining in a blog post is not necessarily the best way to deal with a program’s issues.  I’m not going to say Gwibber doesn’t have issues (I’m running the daily-ppa) but I think the program is excellent.  It allows me to interact with twitter, my status.net cloud instance, facebook, friendfeed, and buzz (coming soon!) and not go to those websites.

The only other program that I find to be this comprehensive is Tweetdeck.  And, it has issues of its own; sort-of support for status.net and no posts over 140 characters.

Anyway, maybe Tyler should have installed the daily-ppa?  The development of this software is at a breakneck pace; I see new versions of gwibber coming out almost, well, daily.  Also, reporting and confirming bugs is another way to help out the project.  I’ve been steadily reporting bugs on Gwibber (and other packages I use) to improve the user experience.  Some of my issues are in part of the way I use it.  I have a lot of accounts that eat a lot of processing power sometimes.  It seems that the memory leaks have been addressed recently; Gwibber isn’t taking up as much of my processor as it was previously.

I thoroughly disagree with this:

When it comes to basically all Ubuntu Twitter apps, there is no benefit, but plenty of drawback. There is no benefit whatsoever in using Gwibber except that it aggregates from multiple sources. But it doesn’t even do that particularly well. The fact that Person A writing on Person B’s wall looks, in Gwibber, to simply be a status update makes it more or less worthless. The fact that trying to view a twitpic picture requires opening a browser anyway, kinda defeats the purpose anyway.

There is plenty of benefit.  I can see what’s going on in the twitter/dent-verse without going to those sites.  I don’t have to keep a browser window/set of tabs for only those sites.  I can send thoughts quickly to all my accounts without going to each site or to ping.fm.

Re: twitpic; yes, this functionality is in the latest daily build.  Re: facebook wall-to-wall; how should this be fixed?  Digging up old posts with sub-posts?  I’m not sure how this would work.  Anyway, you can always click on the time-stamp  link and see what’s going on.  This is what I do for Facebook.

I use Gwibber so I don’t have to go to the web interface to get basic functionality.  Adding in the ability to subscribe to users and all sorts of other things would make the program too heavy, in my opinion.

Gwibber isn’t perfect, but really, are any other programs perfect?

Microblogging Software

I’m using two apps on my computer to follow my microblogging: Gwibber and MahTweets.  Both have the advantage that they don’t use Adobe AIR.

Gwibber

Anyone who reads this blog, knows I’m a huge fan of this software.  I run it every day that I’m in Ubuntu (which is every day…) and I love the great integration that it has with Gnome.  I love the new look that it has (great job @segphault!).

As you can see, the sidebar as been shrunk down to icons.  I quite like the the huge character count in the lower right corner.  The app feels very polished.

The only issue I have with it is that it needs to have “gwibber-service &” run in a terminal before it will start, but this will be taken care of by the full release (I’m using the Daily PPA).  Also, we don’t have status.net support yet, but I’m sure it will be added back in later on in the development.

MahTweets

MahTweets is a status.net/twitter/facebook app that runs natively on Windows.  I really like this program, especially since it has all of the features that I need.

It runs natively on Windows; ie, I don’t need something like Adobe AIR between the program and my OS.  While this allows many programs to be cross-platform, I’d rather just have a program that’s native.

MahTweets has great integration with Windows 7 in how it works with Aero.

This app has multiple columns, similar to Seesmic Desktop.  It doesn’t run on AIR, and it includes more microblogging sites than Seesmic does, so I’m using it instead of Seesmic.  I don’t want to have to have more than one program to follow my various sites; microblogging is supposed to be a simple way of updating people with what you’re doing.

I’m looking forward to whatever improvements come with MahTweets.  It’s a robust app and I think good things can come of it.

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Gwibber 2.0

Gwibber has increased a release number (from the 1.x branch to the 2.x branch) and I must say… it’s awesome.

Screenshot of the new UI:

There are some quirks, as with all pre-release software, and I’m running into them as I write this.

On first try, I’m noticing these things:

• Notify-osd doesn’t seem to work properly, even if you have “show bubbles” checked on the preferences menu.
• Append colon doesn’t seem to be working properly, even though I have it checked in the preferences.
• Upon restart, gwibber doesn’t keep the same window dimensions as I had it upon exit.  This is a minor issue, though it would be nice to have working.
• Related to the above, gwibber doesn’t keep the same position upon restart.  Again, this is a minor issue.
• No Jaiku.  This is minor, but if you use Jaiku (like me), it gives you another reason to drop the service.  I’m not getting as much out of it as I was before.  (Sorry Bugabundo!)

Now that I’m done airing the issues with it, here’s the good stuff:

• New UI.  Gwibber has added a sidebar that shows your individual accounts (identi.ca, twitter, facebook, etc).  You can click on the “replies” heading and see all of the replies to your twitter account (for instance).  This is handy if you’re trying to track something down in a specific account.  There’s also a drop-down menu, but I prefer the sidebar.
• Facebook has the options to “like” and reply to posts.  In the old version, you had to go to Facebook and do your posting and whatnot to individual wall posts.
• Search box at the top of the window.  This is awesome, as I can search on a term and it finds posts related to that term, and returns them by account.  Awesome.
• A refresh button in the toolbar.  This is great, since I can refresh and see what everyone is saying right now.
• Easy access to Favorites on both twitter and identi.ca.  Now, if you’ve faved a certain post, you can see it easily.
• In the same vein, there’s a “Public” filter for both twitter and identi.ca.  You can easily see what people are talking about outside your set of friends.

Do remember that this is from the daily PPA, so it MAY BREAK.  If you need a stable version, use the 1.x branch that’s included in Ubuntu or whatever distro you’re running.

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