This is all about the lovely little Twitter app known as Blu. It’s created by an unknown (well I’ve never heard of them) company called thirteen23. You can download Blu from their site here.
Ok. So you’re at their website and it says ‘Vista Twitter client’. Well if you are on Windows XP you may turn away at this point. DO NOT. It works for you. Now rejoice. So download it, ignore what it says about correct software installed on your comp. Thats all rubbish.
Oh, quick note, you will need Windows .NET 3.5 before you can run this little app.
So you may have noticed that you don’t need to install this thing as such. Awesome, less HDD space taken. First impressions visual and audio wise are very nice. It’s all see through and cool!! But, lets work through this app. So just log-in with you’re Usual Twitter details and click remember me. Hurrah your logged in, such a simple process to get this (unless your Steve Lacey).
Now for the main part. In the centre taking up all the space are the tweets. Hundreds, thousands, millions of them. I say this because you can scroll for an infinate amount of time. If you have had Twitter long enough you could scroll back years!! Impressive, but a little pointless.
Time to make a tweet to the interwebs. You click the speechbubble icon which glows rather nicely, then up pops the dialog box in an awesome fading fasion. In the background of this box you see a counter of how many characters you have left to use. This thing even has spell check. How nice.
Click the image to get a better view
Other icons on the ‘task bar’ of the app include favourite list (I’ll explain more in a bit), the home icon (where all the main tweets can be viewed), all your @replies from your many followers, your direct messages and the refresh button.
Don’t hit refresh too many times though, you will run out of twitter API requests, only get 100 per hour
To reply to a tweet, direct message a user or re-tweet a tweet, just hover over it and the options pop-up
Now for the ‘favourite’ part of the app. Basically this is where all the people that you want to pay special attention go to. In here is only one tweet, the latest one, from each of your favourite people.
Nice little add-on, but I haven’t really used it. I guess the more people you follow the more useful it is.
To add a person you your favourites list, you just go to their profile and add them
Here is a users profile. To get here you click their Twitter display picture. Easy!
This place features the users latest tweet, and the options to favourite/unfavourite, unfollow and to block. Unless you hate the person, you will just use favourite icon.
One last feature I’d like to point out is that it has tinyurl integration. Much easier than visiting the website, don’t you think?
All in all I love this little app. Its easy to use, light on the system and looks and sounds awesome. It auto refreshes and if there is a new tweet gives you a little ‘bing’ sound to let you know. The icon in the top left also shuffles its wings every now and then just to let you know its alive
I strongly recommend you twitter users who run Windows XP or higher to get this. It is a quality piece of software.
Pretty isn’t everything, I certainly don’t like having to wait over 10 seconds for it to animate pointlessly at me, typewriter animate my username at me and THEN finally login.
As well as this there’s a frequent issue that arises that if you click anything whilst it’s animating, it tends to get stuck mid-animation… very inconvenient; usually warrants a restart of the application.
Also I certainly wouldn’t say it’s “light on the system”. Just because it doesn’t install into Program Files; this doesn’t mean that it’s going to take up less disk space. Also it’s very heavy on system memory, 75mb at the moment- that’s more than MSN.
The animations are nice, but they impede on functionality, which just reduces them to an annoyance, remember- Blu doesn’t do anything in terms of functionality that more popular apps like tweetdeck or twitteriffic do.
Lastly, to quote Ross from Friends, You’re means you are. Your means your
Comment by Steve — March 17, 2009 @ 12:24 pm
I have had no such problems that you have listed. It takes no extra time to enter your details than it does on the twitter website.
Their site does say client for vista, so is optimised as such. it doesn’t take that much memory on my system.
I am aware of the ‘your’ typo, will be ammended later.
Comment by Alex — March 17, 2009 @ 1:37 pm
I use twitterific which i think is brilliant, works, well and just does the job
Comment by Scott — March 18, 2009 @ 12:48 pm