Thursday, July 02, 2009

Gwibber in Jaunty

Although I've been using Tweetdeck, principally to gain access to replies to my tweets, I tried out Gwibber today.
Gwibber is included in Jaunty's repos so it's very easy to install.
Nice colourful, but small, GUI where you can see friends tweets and replies under separate tabs. DMs are included with @replies under the Replies tab. Can send tweets and replies from GUI but not DMs. One thing I didn't like is that no visible "characters remaining" is available when writing tweets although everything turns RED if you exceed 140.
A surprise was that mumbles-type notifications appear when Twitter is refreshed. This is useful as you can quickly see if anything interesting has shown up without having to actually open Twitter.
Not sure what the connection with mumbles is but there's no Gwibber plugin in mumbles. It's probably using the libnotify plugin but I can't be sure about that for the moment.
Now I found that Gwibber tended to blank out quite frequently and nothing showed in the GUI for a while (maybe 5-15 minutes). Seems this is because of the limited number of Twitter API calls that are allowed (100 per hour).
This is more easily seen in Tweetdeck with the remaining API calls always shown.
The fact that I was running both Gwibber and Tweetdeck didn't help. Plus I had Gwibber updating every minute. I see how things pan out in time with this and then choose either one or the other.
But, all-in-all, Gwibber is useful.

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