Okay so there is only going to be few people as excited about this as I am but you can probably skip this post if you aren't interested in Twitter or Linux for that matter. I received a tweet last night (actually it was early this morning...) about a Twitter app for linux. I thought it would be some buggy AIR alpha release or a hobbled together resized window web interface. Fortunately it's not and it is awesome. It's built with php and gtk, runs standalone and it doesn't need a standard web browser window to do its job.
The application is called phpitter. At the moment it is still under heavy development, the developer Ryan Hadley has only been working on it for about five days (on the bus ride mind you). The interface is clean simple and easy to use. What's more, for the true geek in us, it spits most of the information out to the terminal, if you don't want to run it as a background process that is.
A few features that stand out are:
* A pop-up or splash screen that appears when you hover over an avatar, you get the username, their Twitter nick, location, bio, website link and follower count. I was glad this feature was available because the main application window only returns the users full name rather than the nick which is helpful for @ replies.
* If you have the libnotify-bin package installed, tweets that come in are put into notification windows so you don't have to have the whole phpitter window open all of the time.
* On the lower left there is combo box that let's you display all of the tweets or just the @ replies. Handy for when you were asleep or out and missed something that was directed towards you.
* Links are clickable. No big issue here but I'm glad it's there as twitter can turn into a link fest, great for disrupting study or going off in tangents.
* The ability to send direct messages and retweet. No real need for an explanation there.
Overall phpitter is a great application, there are a few bugs but only minor ones. For such a young app it is pretty encouraging that it hasn't fallen over yet or spat out any error messages, or showed any signs that it might. Actually it did give me one error message but that was before I installed the libnotify package which can be remedied in Ubuntu with a simple:
sudo apt-get install libnotify-bin
It will be interesting to see what happens when Scobleizer and Co. get chatty again.
If you are interested you can get phpitter here (screenshots as well):
http://code.google.com/p/phpitter/
You probably will need to install a few dependencies, Ryan documents the install process (Ubuntu) here:
http://code.google.com/p/phpitter/wiki/UbuntuHowto
Enjoy.
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