Twextter

Twextter is a Twitter client designed for small screen netbook computer use. Instead of the typical small “portrait” style window, Twextter uses the landscape aspect of a netbook screen to give you all the information you need without the need for scrolling. (Let’s face it - scrolling with the tiny trackpad on most netbooks isn’t fun). It also provides extra information most Twitter clients don’t include such as how many tweets you have remaining during the next 60 minutes and can even launch website links your friends include in their tweets.

Twextter works on Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7 Beta and Linux netbooks, notebooks and desktop PCs.

Features

It’s only early days for Twextter and we’re really only at a beta stage of development but here’s what it can do so far:

* Multi-page views of friends and public tweets
* Current personal stats (followers, following, total tweets)
* Remaining tweets allowed during next 60 minutes
* Auto and manual tweet update controls
* Long message window for the odd tweets that don’t fit on the main tweet list
* Auto-launch of weblinks inside your friend’s tweets
* Basic “name, location and bio” stats of anyone sending a tweet

Twextter will work on any notebook computer or desktop but it’s especially designed for the 1024×600-pixel screens of most netbook computers including the following models:

* Acer Aspire One
* Dell Inspiron Mini 9
* Lenovo S10
* Toshiba NB100
* MSI Wind U90
* MSI Wind U100
* Asus Eee PC 900-series
* Asus Eee PC 1000-series
* HP MiniNote series

Installation

Installing Twextter on a Windows system is pretty straightforward - you download the installer file, run it and Twextter does the rest. Just follow the prompts during installation and when complete, Twextter will appear on your desktop.

Things are slightly different if you’re running it on a Linux system. First, download the .tar.gz file onto your system, then open a Terminal window looking at the folder you downloaded the file to.

Next, type the following:

tar -zxvf Twextter-Build-0.1.23-linux.tar.gz
chmod +x Twextter
./Twextter

And Twextter should appear on your PC.

We haven’t checked yet but we think it should be possible to also run the Windows version inside your Linux system via WINE, the Windows compatibility layer for Linux. As we said, we haven’t checked it yet but we think it could work.

Using Twextter

Login

The first thing that you need to do when you start Twextter is log in to your Twitter account. (Some users are having issues that the login window is not appearing. Try restarting if it doesn’t appear or try <alt-<tab> to see if the login window is buried.

Just enter your Twitter screenname and password and you should get the latest friend tweets appear on screen. You’ll only need to do this once each time you start Twextter. (We’ve done it this way to ensure security so nothing is saved on the hard drive. If enough users complain we’ll think about changing it so you only need to enter those details once.)

Sending Tweets

Twextter is pretty straightforward to use - to send a tweet, simply type your tweet in the tweet post box and press the Tweet button. Simple. Remember - you’ve got 140 characters - that’s it. The box has all the normal editing and supports <crtl>-<c>/<crtl>-<v> copy-and-pasting. If you run out of characters just backspace or swipe over text you want to change and change it. (A TIP: Try using normal shorthand for longer words eg. BTW = by the way, FWIW = for what it’s worth etc).

To get an instant update of your friends or public tweet list, just hit the Refresh button.

Tweets either sent to you or tweets you send to someone else starting with an “@” symbol appear bolded so you can see them more easily.

If you want to check for previous tweets you may have missed, use the Previous Page and Next Page buttons to cycle through pages of 20 tweets at a time. To get back to the latest tweets, just click the Front Page button.

The one thing you should keep an eye on is the Access Limit Counter at the top-left. This will keep track of how many tweets or Twitter service accesses you have remaining in the next 60 minutes. (It doesn’t seem to be commonly known that you have a limit of 100 tweets/server accesses per hour).

Long tweets

Occasionally, there will be tweets that don’t fit in the tweet list window. If you don’t see the whole tweet, just click on it and it will display in what we call the Long Tweet Window.

The Long Tweet Window will display the message for the length of time set by a setting on the Settings tab. You can set it to stay up for between two and 30 seconds, after which time, the Long Tweet Window will disappear.

The Long Tweet Window serves another purpose as well - if you see a tweet that has a webpage link in it, click on the tweet so it appears in the Long Tweet Window, then click on that window - the weblink will then be automatically started up in your webbrowser (Internet Explorer and Firefox supported only).

More features to come

As we said, it’s early days for Twextter but we’ll add in more features as we go. Twextter will automatically notify you when we release new updates.