Monday, October 15, 2012

Review: Tweeki is a beautiful, mobile-like desktop client for Twitter

Twitter is one of the most popular social networks around, and accordingly, Twitter clients are a dime a dozen. Despite how common these clients are, it's surprisingly hard to find one that works well, is simple and easy to use, and is also nice to look at. Tweeki is trying to be just that: A simple and beautiful Twitter client, with all the basic features needed to manage a Twitter account.

Tweeki is an intriguing combination between Web app and desktop app. It runs on Pokki, a desktop interface and store for web apps. �If you don't already have it, it will automatically install when you download Tweeki. Compared to popular clients such as TweetDeck and MetroTwit, Tweeki is no more than a mini-app, and feels almost like something you would install on your mobile device. The interface is nice and clean, and includes everything you could want from a simple Twitter client.

Tweeki's interface makes it very easy to read your Twitter timeline.

After logging in with a Twitter account, you'll find five tabs you can use to browse your stream: timeline, mentions, direct messages, lists and search. The interface is simply gorgeous. Your timeline is easy to read: �Your own tweets appear against a green background and your mentions are marked in orange. This makes it doubly easy to see what's what in your timeline. Tweeki's color scheme cannot be changed, however, and the available one is not colorblind-friendly.

Each tweet includes the usual options to reply, retweet (both old style and new), send a direct messageand add to favorites. Conversation view is also available, helping you keep track of back and forth tweets.

You can easily browse the people you follow, your followers and your favorites.

You can use Tweeki's interface to find all the lists you're a member of, and to create and subscribe to new lists. You can also perform Twitter searches from within the app?those can be saved for recurring use?and even explore world trends through hashtags.

Through the settings, you can enable or disable your Tweeki notifications; these come as either "badges" or "banners", and can be activated for timeline, mentions and/or DMs. Badges will simply show the number of new tweets in a tiny badge over Tweeki's tray icon, while banners are actual pop ups, and are much more noticeable. You can play with these options to create your personal notification preferences. Take note that if you enable banners and then choose to shut down Tweeki, you will be bombarded with them when you launch it again.

The difference between the "badges" and "banners" notifications.

When it comes to tweeting, things are almost perfect. Writing a tweet is easy enough, as is attaching an image, which is a nice feature.

Trouble starts when trying to attach a link. The program's settings include the option to shorten links automatically, but unfortunately, this doesn't always work. Not only does the automation fail, but they sometimes remain long even after shortening manually by clicking and choosing "Shorten link." Even when a link does take its short form, the character count for the tweet doesn't always update, which is quite confusing. Another sorely missed feature is a spell checker.

Set your favorite notification preferences through the settings.

Tweeki includes the option to manage more than one Twitter account. You can add more users by clicking the small arrow next to your profile image at the bottom of the window. Once you add several accounts, you can easily switch between them through the same arrow. Switching accounts takes several seconds, and notifications are not labeled in any way to indicate which account they belong to. This turns multiple-account management in Tweeki into quite a confusing experience.

In the first ten minutes I used Tweeki, it lost connection to Twitter for quite a long time, �and it wasn't entirely reliable when it came to showing every single tweet. This problem solved itself within approximately 30 minutes. Since it's part of Pokki, there's no visible way to close Tweeki. You can sign out from your Twitter account, but you might have to enter your username and password all over again next time you want to log in.

Tweeki is a simple client with a stunning interface, and as long as you don't need to manage more than one account, it's an excellent free option. Tiny and sweet, it turns keeping up with Twitter into a joyous task, despite the occasional reliability issue, which is present in almost every client. If you need to manage several accounts, and want to spend some money, you might have better luck with MetroTwit. In all other scenarios, give Tweeki a spin.

Note: The "Try it for free" button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

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