twhirl does FriendFeed
The big news today - for FriendFeed users at least - is that twhirl now supports FriendFeed. I first spotted the news when I turned my monitors on this morning and my eye was caught by a message on Twitter from Corvida from SheGeeks where twhirl had released an update that now had support for FriendFeed.
So once I had managed to get another coffee through the system and got caught up with my reading I grabbed the update and installed it. Now right off the but as Frederic at The Last Podcast pointed out in his review today this is not a unified client. twhirl will launch separate windows for each of the services. If you are already using twhirl you will need to add your FriendFeed sign-on info. Now this one took me a minute or two figure out as you would typically think that the place this was down was the settings section you can access from the main twhirl window open for Twitter. It’s not - what you will have to do is right click on the notification tray icon for twhirl and access the Account Manager dialog.
In the Account Manager dialog just select the FriendFeed service and add your info when asked for it. Once you have entered it a new window for the FriendFeed display for twhirl - you can see both displays in the graphic - just click on it for a larger view.
At this point just about everyone is comparing this newest twhirl addition with Alert Thingy - the current main desktop app for FriendFeed. What I will say as far as the comparison is concerned is that Alert Thingy has one thing over twhirl and that is you can post new messages to FriendFeed as well as include graphics. Whereas twhirl has Alert Thingy beat in that you can adjust the font size which was the deal breaker for me as far as Alert Thingy was concerned.
Other than not being able to post new messages directly to FriendFeed from twhirl is that when you like a post or add a comment to one that post doesn’t come to the top of the list as it does in the FriendFeed web interface. I think for a lot of FriendFeed users this will be more problematic of the two issues as this is the expected action and helps keep you on top of the conversation as it is happening.
One other thing I encountered with this release of twhirl is refresh issues when trying out some of the other themes that come with the program. Plus I had to restart the program when I went to try and rest back to my theme of preference as the Account Manager dialog just didn’t want to play nice.
If anything this first release of twhirl with FriendFeed would get my vote because of the simple matter that they let me adjust the font size so that I can actually use it however I did notice that there seem to be some refresh issues of new items but I can’t tie that one down so it could just be on my end. The one other thing that I would like to have the option of being able to do is to have the two different service dialog window use different themes. At this point when both of them are using the same theme it can take a second or two to differentiate between the two.
Personally I think that it is way to early to pick any of the available clients for FriendFeed as a leader and really the web interface is still the better of the options available.
Conversation Tags: FriendFeed, twhirl, Alert Thingy