Janetter

With TweetDeck having been acquired by Twitter and the subsequent removal of useful features including but not limited to TweetDeck's long update service, deck.ly, that let you post updates that were longer than 140 characters, I've been thinking about switching Twitter clients.  I moved to TweetDeck originally because the very first New Twitter was absolutely horrible and the redesigns that have followed haven't improved it at all.

A few friends of mine are using Janetter, so I downloaded it and tried it out for a bit.

It's got a simple interface similar to TweetDeck and lets you easily follow conversations between people.  TweetDeck has that feature but it's glitchy and sometimes only shows one tweet from one of the people.

Also, it has something that intrigued me.  Its themes are done entirely with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.  This came into play straight away because I browsed through the themes and discovered that what I really wanted would essentially require me to combine aspects of a few of them together.  I most definitely have that capability, but it suffers from a complete and total lack of documentation.  I can't just make a new folder in the directory where the themes are stored, copy data from another theme there, modify to my liking, and have my results show up in the theme list automagically.  There is a button you can click to add a new theme, but it prompts for its own special format, which may possibly just be a renamed ZIP archive, but once again, there's no documentation.

Playing around with it I noticed it's got some horrible custom window border bullshit by default, but when changing themes you can check a checkbox that says "Use the default Windows visual style".  And you have to do so every time you change your theme, because the box helpfully unchecks itself.

I was a bit disappointed that it doesn't seem to have the ability to disable automatic updates.  I don't really want anything I have installed automatically updating any portion of itself.  This even goes for Steam and games released upon it, but there even if you disable it you'll find the automatic updates mysteriously re-enabled if you go back in some time later.  I would much prefer a simple notification of an update and a yes/no choice for installing said update.

Feature-wise, it's missing a few things I use in TweetDeck, like the ability to see tweets from people you're following that are replies to people you aren't following.  You can actually see those tweets, but it's buried on a dialog box.  Also missing is a UI column that shows you who's following you.  Once again, it's buried on a dialog box.  And even within that, you can't use Twitter's "Block and report spam" feature.

So, whatever, it's a Twitter client, and the main functionality works.  I kind of went about my business and ignored it for a while, while I did other things.

Then I decided I wanted to play around with it some more, only to discover I couldn't find it on my taskbar.

Double-clicking on its tray icon brings it back up.  I went into the options and verified that "Show in taskbar when minimized" was checked, but it still minimizes to the system tray instead.  I then thought "well, maybe I need to restart it for that change to take effect", so I closed it.  Or so I thought.  The close button also just minimizes to the system tray.  Instead of, you know, actually closing the program.  To close it, you have to right click on the system tray icon and select "Quit".  Which is retarded.

I absolutely hate "minimize to system tray" as a general principle.  I want my shit to be right there on the taskbar where I can find it.  I hide all my system tray icons so that there's more space for the taskbar entries.  I really don't want to have to go into the system tray on a regular basis.

After noticing several updates from people I was following in TweetDeck and having Janetter not notify me about them, I inspected the notification options and noticed that the one notification feature anyone would ever want over any other possible notification feature, being notified of new tweets from the people you're following, is disabled by default.  A lot of sense that makes.

The verdict: I guess I'll just stick with TweetDeck, until the Adobe Air version stops working.  After that, I don't know what I'll do.