David Alison's Blog

I've become quite attached to Twitter lately, as several of my blog posts will attest. I use it for a wide range of things; a source of news (technical and non-technical), to chat with friends and share things I find of interest, to ask and answer questions on Macs, Ruby on Rails, etc. and finally to banter about my favorite sports teams (Redskins and Caps, thank you very much). Given this wide range of uses I tend to be accessing my Twitter feeds throughout the day and the web interface simply doesn't handle things the way I need it to. As a result I use a custom client to access Twitter. A custom client presents Tweets in their own interface, accessing the data through the Twitter API. You drop in your Twitter username and password and the custom client takes over from there, presenting you with a view of your Tweets and the ability to create them as well. Over the last few months I've tried a number of different Twitter clients for my Mac. First it was TweetDeck , an Ad...

For a while now I've been using TweetDeck to access my Twitter account. While I love many of the features that TweetDeck has made popular I always struggle with the UI. Though it's quite usable the fact that it's built on top of Adobe Air means it doesn't look quite right on my Mac's OS X desktop. I've tried a number of different Twitter clients for Mac but none worked quite as well as TweetDeck did for me. Then along came Nambu , which is still in beta. Nambu looks and feels like a normal OS X application. The design is similar to TweetDeck in some respects but has some key enhancements that make it much more powerful. Multiple Twitter Accounts I have two Twitter accounts that I use: dalison and sharedstatus . The former is my personal account where I ramble on about my blog, Macs, sports and things I find amusing on the Interwebs. The latter is an account for my main product and I use it to announce features and generally cover business related topics. Fort...

I'm finding myself using Twitter more and more these days and not for putting out tweets about what I'm doing at the moment. Twitter is slowly replacing my RSS reader as my vehicle of choice for news I care about, whether it's general, technical, Mac specific or sports related. I've used it to promote my new company ( SharedStatus ), chat with friends about topics I care about, help people with Mac and Ruby on Rails specific questions and generally build up a network of people I like to chat and network with. I can ask a question on Twitter and usually get an answer almost immediately. For these and lots of other reasons I've found Twitter to be a great addition to my online experience. While I really like Twitter I know it can be improved so here are my top 5 features/changes for making Twitter better: 1) Make ReTweets fundamental ReTweets (usually abbreviated RT in tweets) are likely the most powerful networking component of Twitter. When you find something of va...