[Discuss] Gwibber

[akwala at gmail.com (a k'wala)]

Ubuntu dropped Gwibber in 13.04, and its developer, Ken VanDine, rewrote it
targeting Ubuntu Touch, apparently taking the cue from Ubuntu Corp's new
all-roads-lead-to-Ubuntu-Touch dogma. Gwibber is now Friends...
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/04/gwibber-not-in-ubuntu-13-04-install-friends

I switched to Choqok a while back and it worked great, with support for
lists and multiple accounts for Twitter and Identi.ca. Haven't used it
lately since it had some issues following the Ubuntu upgrade to Raring, and
it doesn't support Identi.ca's new pump.io network.



--aslam
http://gplus.to/akwala


On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 1:35 PM, Tom Metro <tmetro+blu at gmail.com> wrote:

> Bill Ricker wrote:
> > Do you know if Gwibber will manage multiple Twitter IDs simultaneously ?
>
> It appears that it can't. The account management UI is set up such that
> you can add to an arbitrary list of accounts, and it next prompts you
> for the network, but if you select Twitter and you already have a
> Twitter account authorized, it just shows you the authorization status
> and doesn't prompt you for additional credentials.
>
>
> > Interesting, Gwibber has improved a lot since i last used it.
>
> I've been using it for several years, with some long breaks when the
> version in the repository seemed broken.
>
> Gwibber started off strong at a time when there were few 3rd party
> Twitter clients available, but its feature set has long been eclipsed by
> even the most basic Twitter clients found on Android. Development
> progress has been frustratingly slow.
>
> It has numerous usability problems. Scrolling is slow, often pausing as
> it retrieves more messages. Even loading cached messages from the local
> disk is slow. And there is no UI feedback while this is happening. The
> scrollbar behaves in an atypical way.
>
> Recent versions actually seem to have removed useful functionality. With
> earlier versions there was a per-message menu that let you view the
> message online in a browser. This was a convenient way to fill in for
> all the missing features in Gwibber, like viewing a profile or seeing a
> message in the context of its full conversation, but that was removed.
> (There is a "View user profile" menu option, but I haven't seen it work
> in a long time.) Copying a full tweet with user ID is also no longer
> possible with the newer UI.
>
> I also still sometimes see Gwibber stop updating and CPU usage spike,
> necessitating that I kill the process. For a while it did this
> consistently, which is why I stopped using it for long stretches. It now
> does this only occasionally.
>
> Gwibber has two big selling points. One is that it is multi-protocol. At
> one time I had it successfully working with Identi.ca and Facebook, but
> the Facebook authorization has been broken for a year or more. Identi.ca
>  changed its name and servers 3 or 4 months back. It seems like only
> Twitter remains working.
>
> The other is "Multicolumn user interface for viewing multiple streams."
> I'm not sure if this is a vaporware feature, or if it is just a problem
> with the UI for it, but I've never seen a way to actually create
> additional streams in the UI. To make Twitter practical, this is really
> a must-have feature once you follow more than a few dozen people.
>
> I'm running 3.4.2, which seems to be newer than any version mentioned on
> the Launchpad page, https://launchpad.net/gwibber/3.0, or even the daily
> build PPA https://launchpad.net/~gwibber-daily/+archive/ppa, which I do
> have configured in my sources list, but apt-cache tells me my installed
> version was sourced from precise-updates from the main
> us.archive.ubuntu.com repository. Something is a bit broken when the
> distribution version is newer than the developer's PPA. Maybe the
> project has been forked?
>
> If I had not shifted most of my Twitter use over to Android, I'd be
> looking for an alternate Twitter client on the desktop. Web-based tools
> like Hootsuite are OK, but they still fall short of the potential for
> what a multi-protocol social networking tool could be. They also tend to
> leak memory badly.
>
> In recent years Twitter has gone out of its way to discourage the
> development of general purpose Twitter clients. They really don't like
> the idea of competition and the possibility that a 3rd party client
> might be able to bypass their ads. They've limited the number of users
> permitted under an application's API token. A few Android apps have hit
> this limit and had to stop accepting new customers. So knowing your
> product will be limited to a small audience, and that Twitter could
> clamp down on restrictions even further at any time, I imagine this has
> really taken a lot of motivation out of writing Twitter clients.
>
> Over on Android I use Plume and Slices (both are Twitter-only). The
> latter makes good on the vaporware feature mentioned above. You can
> categorize each of the users you follow, and then view just that
> category. It also lets you create a home screen widget that shows
> messages from only one specified category. So you can easily keep tabs
> on people in your industry, or just your friends, without having their
> messages lost in "the fire hose."
>
>  -Tom
>
> --
> Tom Metro
> Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
> "Enterprise solutions through open source."
> Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/
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