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A Month with Desktop Clients – Results

Josh Johnson — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 05:56:33 +0000

Exactly one month ago, I decided to stop using web clients and start using desktop clients for some frequent tasks. What did I find? I like theweb clients better. For most of the apps I tried, I lasted about a day or two.

Why? I don’t know. Maybe I have pre-conditioned myself to automatically open the browser over the last 15 years. In some cases, I simply preferred the web version. These are all great apps though, here’s the break down:

Postbox is a great app, but I just prefer gmail. The web user interface is about as good as I could wish for.
NetNewsWire was the same as above, google reader (with the help of ByLine on my iPhone) is what I prefer.
Tweetie is the one case where I did use the desktop application. Tweetie has a better user experience than twitter itself.
MarsEdit was a long shot anyway, I mean, this is the first post since a month ago, I just haven’t blogged enough to even remember it exists.

So there it is. I’m a web-based junkie.

A Month with Desktop Clients

Josh Johnson — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 23:02:41 +0000

Between Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader, and now, google voice, I spend 99% of my time in the google domain. So I guess I’ll try some desktop software for awhile and see how it goes. I’ve decided (apparently just now) that I will do this for a month. The choices?

Postbox for Gmail (and my MobileMe)
NetNewsWire for Google Reader
Tweetie for Twitter (which I have been neglecting)
MarsEdit for Blogging (which is even more neglegted)

If you choose, you could blame this post as an opportunity to test out MarsEdit. But I’m not judging.

Tweetie for Mac

Josh Johnson — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 03:46:46 +0000

Monday is here and as promised, atebits has released Tweetie for Mac. Having spent the $2.99 for the iPhone version I had high hopes for the Mac version. With a couple exceptions, it is great!

I’ve been a Twhirl user for some time, it ended up being the better of many, many twitter clients. I think I may switch, however to Tweetie for one feature alone: Conversation view. Being able to click on a conversation I have no context for and seeing what is going on makes so much sense, I’m suprised it hasn’t happened before. (It may have, I just haven’t looked)

The worst part, no opacity option. While this seems simple enough to ignore, It helped in the focus department. Set the opacity to 20% when not active and you don’t see the thousands of tweets streaming by every second.

Sacrifice! I’ll have to sacrifice opacity for a better, in my opinion, UI. Good UI makes me happy.